Core Team Explores Idea to Automatically Upgrade Sites Running WordPress 3.7 to 3.8

WordPress 3.7 ‘Basie’ was released on October 24, 2013 and introduced automatic updates for minor releases to the masses. Although it’s not labeled as such, WordPress 3.7 has effectively acted as a LTS version or Long-term support. Security updates and crucial bug fixes have been ported back to previous branches up to 3.7.

In this week’s WordPress developer chat, Aaron Jorbin, WordPress core developer, asked if it’s time to stop back porting fixes to 3.7-4.0 and instead, update those sites directly to 4.1.

According to version statistics on WordPress.org, 0.4% of tracked sites are using WordPress 3.7. “I would like to see a published proposal outlining reasons, usage data, and any tradeoffs/considerations and leave a bit of time for feedback before definitely doing this,” Joe McGill, Core contributor said.

“It’s unclear to me what are the things that must happen and what are the things that should happen before we take this step.”

Developers noted that WordPress automatically updates minor versions and that if protections are not built-in to automatically upgrading major versions, it could cause users to lose trust in the system.

“We need to make sure all users with outdated installs get warned one way or the other. Then if they decide to turn updates off…,” Andrew Ozz, Core developer said.

After further discussion, the team agreed that upgrading sites from 3.7 to 3.8 would be a good stepping stone towards getting those sites up to 4.1. “It can also be done in the API so that we only do a small percentage at first and then stop and analyze and then increase the percentage,” Jorbin said.

A proposal will be crafted by members of the core team and published on the Make WordPress Core site for further discussion.