Pippin Williamson on Backwards Compatibility
May 8, 2015Pippin Williamson with a great presentation at LoopConf about Backwards Compatibility and why it’s such an important thing to think about when you develop plugins. He covers many examples of what could happen if you break things and how to avoid those issues.
Backwards compatibility is a cornerstone of WordPress core development philosophy. It is, unfortunately, not something nearly enough plugin or theme developers take seriously. When a plugin or theme project gains 10s or 100s of thousands of users, backwards compatibility can be crucial to the overall health of the project.
Ensuring backwards compatibility is more of a mental mindset than anything. Developers have to mentally make the commitment and say to themselves “I will NOT break installs during upgrades”.
As we are building our own plugin at the moment, Backwards Compatibility is something i think about a lot lately, because as soon as we have it released, some things will be impossible or much harder to change so we better try to get it right the first time.