The day before yesterday I just updated my WordPress install to the latest, which at the time of this writing is 2.8.3, and well it was not as simple as I would have liked it. The auto-update function does not seem to work with my settings, and it seems that after reading up on what it requires to function, I an certain that many people’s PHP installations (if not most) are not going to allow it to function. It says the site’s files must be owned by the same user PHP executes as, or at least that is how I interpreted what they said in the instructions. Well that limits it to PHP installations that implement some form of suPHP or the like. Or they have all of their files owned by apache, or have some other really weird setup. Well my system does not use suPHP, and I am happy about that due to the performance differences. The manual update was strait forward, but still seemed overcomplicated, due to their not wanting to suggest anything that would hoze people’s custom changes, plugins, etc. It worked, and I am happy about that. I did have a full backup of everything just in case.
One thing I am grateful for is the fact that it will let me know when I log in to the administrative interface that there is a new version, please upgrade. I have seen too many fairly complicated PHP software applications get installed and never updated, and though that is often because people don’t actually think, look, or care in the first place, it is nice to see a feature like that to help people, who are not complete douche-bags, to keep their application up to date. If people only knew the horrible things that can happen when they apply the “set it and forget it” attitude to publicly available site software, or server software. I could tell you horror stories that would make you piss yourself, or well probably just laugh. They, as human’s have loved to do from the beginning, often get mad and blame the network administrators or web host for not being psychic and knowing that they didn’t pay attention to their ancient software and automatically update it for them. People need to own their problems, but at least a reminder helps make the need for an update clear to the person responsible, if they are actually using the software. I am sure there are ways you can even have an email sent to you when an update is needed.