Oh yeah... Now I remember what I didn't like about WordPress

I use WordPress to power one of my other blogs, and since I had some free time today I decided now might be a good time to upgrade to 2.5... and then I remembered one of the most irritating differences between WordPress and Drupal.... How the distribution of plugins/modules is handled within the community.

In Drupal, all available contributed modules have a home on drupal.org. It may not be the best laid out section of the site, and it might not exactly tell you want the best modules are for what you want to do, but two things hold true... One, if a module is abandoned, the code is on drupal.org and thus available. Two, the modules section is extremely clear about what version of the module to use for the version of Drupal you're running. Also, with Drupal... usually every release has major changes to the Drupal API, which usually insures that a module for 5 isn't going to work for 6 without changes. This, at least to me, seems to be an area where Drupal is pretty clear cut.

WordPress, on the other hand, hasn't historically been so organized. It used to be that WordPress modules were mostly hosted on personal websites of people and linked to from the Codex. Though, recently, they seem to have moved to a plugin directory where code is hosted in a centralized spot... which is definately a move in the right direction, but there's one problem.... It's still remarkably unclear what versions of WordPress any of these modules run under. Granted, I have the knowledge with WordPress that generally there aren't the sort of large changes from version to version in the plugin API that there are in Drupal... so most of the time, plugins tend to work when you change versions... but I'm a paranoid sort and the fact that I'm not being explictly told that this module has been tested and works with 2.5, it means I have to take the extra time to test it... and that makes my whole upgrading process a whole lot more painful than I'd like it to be... Well, actually, to amend that statement... SOME of the plugins list what they're compatible with... but many haven't been updated recently so it's hard to know if they actually are compatible with 2.5 or not.