Now that we’re now 10 days into the release of version 2.6 of WordPress, it’d be interesting to look at a few of the numbers around it.
- There have been around 23 thousand downloads per day. (Of just the English version.)
- According to the update system there are 201 thousand blogs using 2.6 already.
- That’s about 9% of all known WordPress.org blogs in 10 days.
- The video in the announcement post has been viewed 665,080 times.
- There have been over 300 themes submitted to the new Theme directory, which launched just 6 days ago.
- In the same period (10 days) there were 579,871 downloads of 2,527 plugins.
I imagine 2.6 adoption will pick up after the 2.6.1 release — a lot of people wait for the .1 before upgrading.
How are we celebrating? By working on 2.7!
It should be a fun release both for the features we have planned and also because it might incorporate some of the aspects of Crazyhorse, our experimental bizarro world dev branch which we’re laser-eye-testing in NYC next week. (700 blogs are running 2.7 already.)
sweet! already running 2.6, can’t wait to see what is in store for 2.7!
Wow that is awesome
I hope the numbers get bigger
And i can’t wait for 2.7 Release Already too. 😀
Thanks Matt for letting us know !!
Hi, Matt,
That’s a pretty quick progression through versions. I wonder if you mightn’t expand on your goals for versioning. In contrast, for instance, the Linux kernel has two more iteration levels; not sure if there’s a development philosophy that underpins these.
Now, if the Gears feature(s) included simple offline writing…. I know, it’s not that simple.
Thanks for all the hard work.
Daniel Black
Great news. Love the new release. My favourite features are the ‘Press This’ browser button and the image caption.
That’s awesome. Can’t wait for version 2.7 🙂
More and more people should upgrade to 2.6 asap and more should upgrade to 2.7 through SVN!
As a convenience for the WordPress community, I’ve setup two demo blogs which feature the upcoming versions:
WP 2.7 is here: http://demo.talkpress.de/trunk/
WP Crazy Horse: http://demo.talkpress.de/crazyhorse/
Feel free to toy around, but don’t add any posts which might improve your chances at next year’s nobel prize – the demo blogs are reset every hour or so…
Still I’d prefer Image Caption not to use ‘Alt’ field as it’s content.
Now, its time to wait for 2.7 😀
Numbers are great but they are still greater if local versions were taking in count.
A counter could be install on fr.wordpress.org for example and on the other local web site on wordpress.org. Downloads are now on this platforms.
Usually love wordpress releases, but it seems wordpress 2.6 has hard coded uploadsm aking it impossible for some to use gallery features 🙁 I hope 2.7 is an improvement.
Neil, not that I know of, in fact uploads should be more customizable before. I would try asking on the support forums and if you think it’s a real bug file it.
Great numbers, from italian site (not counting it.wordpress.org where theere is no counters available) till now more than 4000 downaloads, considering lot of people uese the englis version it’s not bad… we will see with 2.6.1.
Any anticipation about new features planned for 2.7?
it’s great, but… i wish version cycles would be slower, bugfixes faster. fixing stuff like the failure of switching from wysiwyg to code and back not working for some lot of users is imho more important, than adding new features. or the 2.5 interface changes: please let me decide, how my editor screen looks, i’d like to have my frequently acesssed interface within the initial viewport, instaed of having to scroll down an up again.
Marco, typically bugs like describe are fixed within a few days of notification. If yours is still in trunk, it’s because we don’t know about it yet! I’ve passed your details to someone who can help, hopefully we can get you cleared up soon. (And if so, please post an update here.)
Hi matt. WordPress 2.6 is such a great version. I think people must not anymore wait for 2.6.1
Hello Matt,
I hate update marathons – I know security is necessary, but every four months absolut new or great new things are to heavy for me.
I would like to have time for blogging. Automatic update is good if someone need english language, it doesn’t work properly for our German languages. The last weeks I had to repair so many blogs because they use automatic updates.
I had to migrate 24 blogs of a big customer to another blogsoftware because their editor hate the new admininterface – and he was so angry that the developer of WP wouldn’t hear all the people …
I’m addicted to WP, but sometimes I can’t understand why WP is on the growl for new versions.
kindly regards
Monika
Monika, we haven’t done a security release in 91 days. We release new feature versions every 3-4 months simply because that’s what people have told us they want, and have voted with their blogs that they find value in the new versions. We’ve done the opposite too — there was a year between 2.0 and 2.1 — and it sucked.
As for automatic update or concerns with the interface in 2.5, the good news is that because we’re moving quickly we can be very responsive to people’s feedback, and the laser testing I mention in the blog post above is an effort to try and streamline the posting process for folks like your editor.
I am very happy to hear that. I love WP.
i just feel so in love with wp 2.6 with new function! keep like this…spread the wordpress around the world!
Doesn’t this mean that 91% are still running WordPress 2.5.x and WordPress 2.3.x? That is slightly troublesome, since both of those versions are no longer supported and might be exploited later.
Jacob, basically, but the numbers will change a lot when (for example) 2.6 gets in the update system for cpanel.
And get a Gravatar!
Glad to hear that!
Do you have numbers from 2.5 to compare? I’d assume that they’re better, due to the far smaller effect on plugins/themes, and more immediately valuable (but also optional) features.
Adam, 2.5 did about 17k downloads per day, but over 27 days. The numbers are always higher right after a release then start to trail off. The de-duped downloads for 2.5.x were 1.4 million over 108 days. Were you looking for anything specific?
300 themes submitted, and only 22 approved?
I know a review process is necessary, but it needs to be much quicker. Who are the people that approve/deny? What criteria are they basing the decision on? The process just seems a little secretive for a service on the .org.
Nathan, all of the requirements are documented in the directory but since it’s brand new we’re learning things as we go along so we’re doing a lot of programming, automation, and giving each theme one-on-one attention to make sure everything in the directory is super high quality. Once we get rolling I wouldn’t expect wait time for a new theme to be more than a few hours, but there’s a lot of work between here and there.
amazing, the release-dates are becoming faster and faster, great!
Now, I’m installing my newest blog with WP 2.6 and waiting the WP 2.7 to update it.
Great work.
Any chance at all that 2.7 will include the ability to designate our own custom default avatar? I was quite disappointed to find that option not included in 2.6. I hate bringing in another plug-in to provide a function that *should* be built-in.
SJ, not sure what you mean? You want to update your Gravatar from inside WP?
After multiple forum try’s nothing has shown up, bug has been added to trac, lets see if that helps 😉 Other blogs on 2.5.1 still uploading well, so it seems prob is with 2.6
No. When a commenter doesn’t have a Gravatar, instead of Gray Guy or a monster or something that looks like a quilting block, I want to use the default Gravatar I designed to match my blog. I think that option should be included in the basic settings, so you can upload your custom default Gravatar and designate that for people who don’t have their own.
There are plug-ins that provide this option, but I wish it was buillt into WP itself, like the other default Gravatar choices are.
Matt, your above interpretation of SJ’s comment, be it what she really meant or not, would be lovely. TOTALLY.
This was great. Update was easy and no problems after update.
Again WP shows the world its no. 1 blogging engine!
WP 2.6 was a solid release. Very well done. I also really like what I’m seeing from that admin interface in crazyhorse. Thanks to Robert for making a public demo so people can try it out easily! I also tried out the automatic upgrade plug-in for this release and it worked very well. Have you guys considered moving that to core (like plug-in upgrades) or are there too many issues with it?
“Over 300 themes submitted..”
Hmm, I only see 24 at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/
Were the rest rejected for some reason?
Matt,
Good to hear! I’m just so glad that there’s a theme directory again 🙂 I have no problem being patient while all the bugs are worked out.
After the delay with 2.5, it was really refreshing to see 2.6 come out so amazingly early. There may not be huge, jaw dropping changes, but the work is still appreciated. I can’t believe more people haven’t upgraded already.
For those of us running a blog as something other than a hobby the updates are WAY too frequent.
wordpress is becoming more more a cms, the only thing that i miss is a inbuild multi-language-support, i know there a plugins around, but would be great to see how wordpress would handle this. any chance to see this on the feature-list in the near future?
thats awesome!
Close to 2.7, and yet, if you hit “Submit Comment” on an empty comment, you get the ugly error page.
Why isn’t WordPress handling this type of error a bit more… aesthetically?
I have a strange theory called CONTRAST, which says that things would be only that much difficult or that much easy so as to create a statistical distribution of rendition quality. It is chicken and egg really. If some software doesn’t change fast enough, how to separate the men from the boys.
I like the way the themes directory is set up much more than the way the plugin directory is. I might actually use the themes one since it doesn’t require me to store stuff in the wordpress svn like the plugin one does. Any chance that the plugins directory could switch to a system like the themes directory in the future?
Dean, you’re using SVN in the themes directory too, you just don’t know it. 🙂
Probably not going to replicate it for the plugin directory in the short term because it’s doing fine on its own and if you can’t use SVN you probably shouldn’t be distributing a plugin.
¡Felicitaciones! (¡Congratulations!)
Hi Matt, just out of curiosity, you say there have been over 300 themes submitted to the new them directory. Why when I go there does it say, “28 themes, 34,377 downloads, and counting”. Am I missing something?
James, as I said in a comment above yours, themes need to be reviewed before showing up in the directory so we can maintain a high level of quality.
I would love to see in the next version or two to have the gallery improved. I know there are plugins out there, but photo’s have become very popular in posts and would love to see the core improved.
Just installed Crazyhorse – works fine with 16 plugins! Great Job!
Thanks, Matt, for the numbers — and for 2.6, itself!
Chiming in on the frequency of new versions, count me in the group who like the quicker updates. I personally like to see improvements / developments every few months.
Of course, it’s not a lot of work for me, I use DreamHost’s one-click install/upgrades, which have worked flawlessly so far! 🙂
Matt-
Looking at 2.7 and Crazyhorse- Thanks Robert for posting both- I’ve got to say that I almost jumped for joy when I saw Crazyhorse just had a single “Add media” button instead of the 4 choices that lead to almost identical interfaces in 2.5/2.6
I teach WordPress as a business CMS- and the media handler has been made too complicated for most users according to my class feedback.
Too many options- not clear descriptions of what all the options do- and, when they want to put a video in from YouTube- they get a link instead of an embedded video most times.
I’m pretty web savvy- and I still think putting a piece of media into a post shouldn’t be that complex.
As to the new theme directory- I’m glad something new is up, but, don’t you trust the community to grade the themes? How about just building in a compatibility checker? Dr. Dave had one in Spam Karma 2 (which was a great alternative to Akismet with it’s odd requirement to start a WordPress.com site to get a key- c’mon).
Yes- the new versions have been improvements (bringing PressThis back for one) but- with each new version brings new update/compatibility issues- PodPress breaking is a major one.
At some point- there has to be a balancing act if you don’t want to frustrate the hell out of the user base.
Bravo WP ..
As one of those people less than enthused about the endless parade of CMS-ized upgrades and cosmetic changes, I wonder if you can say – if it’s even been discussed, yet – what the next “stable legacy” version in Debian will be, after 2.0.n becomes unsupported in a year or so?
Matt, the number one thing I wish you’d do for 2.7 is to make it easy to change folder names. That would improve security immensely. There should not be any universally known names to any folders. Should be individual to each blog.
I know there are some plugins that do this, but none of them work when servers are a bit behind in their SQL or PHP versions. Which is more common than it should be.
Please consider working on this for 2.7
Thanks in advance . . . .
Congratulations!
I’m waitng for 2.7 8)
i hope WP 2.7 will be launched soon,
and have much stuff and new capacity,
i’m waiting for WP 2.7 😀
I personally don’t mind WP version being rolled out every few months. I mean who wants to wait a whole year for great new features 😉
I think the main reason why people are stuck at older version of WP is because they are afraid that the plugins will stop working with the latest version.
I finally upgraded to 2.6 and very happy to note that all the plugins are still working 🙂 Even the plugin authors have started working very fast and making sure they are compatible with the latest WP version.
I agree that releases should be as often/fast as possible; HOWEVER, when there are known bugs [like all of my hundreds of categories going blank! and requiring a lot of hassle to figure out what the new taxonomy is all about and where in the SQL it has been moved after WP automatically destroyed the data! DOH!] then that release should be labeled as “alpha”, “beta” or “gamma”, so that I don’t make the mistake of trying it out on a production server, and so that people can have realistic expectations.
Keep up the great work, Matt! Thank you!