In reply to Robert Cox.

Hi Robert

This is Juan, lead developer on Views, part of Toolset. I do not want to open fire again about this, but I wanted to add my 2 cents about this.

First, the change that broke our shortcode was merged merely hours before it got released, so I do not think it is a god example on how developers and site admins should betatest WordPress upcoming versions. BTW, we always develop over the latests release and the latest nightly build, and we foresee deprecations and changes in time. It can not happen when a breaking hotfix, which was indeed needed (security goes first) gets released and automatically updated without proper prior notice.

Second, this is indeed the only example I can remember of WordPress releasing an update with some breaking changes without proper notice. And I've been around fore some years now. Credit where it is due.

Thirds, we were not doing anything against best practices, standards, Codex guidelines or even code spirit. "intended functionality" is not something one can easily define. INtended by whom and for what? Shorcodes are placeholders based on attributes (meaning, variables). What you do with them is up to you, and of course we used them for templating. We also use them for other things that also got broken, BTW.

Back to topic, as developer I would love to see WordPress moving even faster, if you ask me, and knowing that backwards compatibility is a must ensures the right path. But that is not always the case: there have been several proposals for a new syntax for shortcodes that got rejected by the core team besides a whole affected-team of developers, meeting in an official room in the Slack channel, agreeing in it.

Regards.