I love developing software and I have been doing for the past 5 years or so. One thing that has been on mind recently is why people do not upgrade their website software. By this I mean the scripts and programs they use to manage their site. Some examples of what I am talking about are ( 68 Classifieds, WordPress, Joomla )
I have came to the conclusion that it must be for one of several reasons.
1. They are not comfortable enough to perform the upgrade themselves.
2. They perceive what they have is good enough and no real need to upgrade.
3. They have customized the script so much that an upgrade is a daunting task.
For the ones that can’t upgrade or are uncomfortable to do the upgrade I can only recommend you either create a test account and learn the ins and outs of how to perform upgrades. Or hire someone to perform the upgrades on your site for you. You have spent your time and research and found the product you want to use. It is important to keep the software up to date.
Some people think that the version they are running is fine and has been working fine since it was installed. So no real reason to upgrade. That may be true but I have seen people using scripts that are more than 2 to 3 years old. On the web a lot changes in this time frame and I can assure the script has gotten better, more bugs fixed, and probably a better design since then.
Finally we have the ones that customize a script so much that performing an upgrade is a daunting task. I sympathize with this group because that is what I tend to do as well. You have made so many little changes and have no idea what you changed. Especially in a month or two when a new release comes out.
How to Make Upgrades Easier
Now that we see some of the reasons people do not upgrade lets look at it from a developers standpoint and try to brainstorm ways of making it easier for people to actually upgrade.
Some of the ideas I have are:
1. Automatic Upgrades.
2. Software As A Service Implementation
3. Patch files / Changed files
I believe automatic upgrades would be the ideal solution however I could see it getting complex from a coding standpoint. You would need to download the software, upload, and extract it on their site. Not to mention backup the database and perform any alterations. Another downside to this is it would wipe out any custom changes and if it screwed up half way through it would need some type of roll back feature.
Software as a service is probably the best implementation since the company that creates the code is responsible for every part of it. You can’t customize it or modify it. So upgrades are easy as just rolling out a new release from svn.
Lastly I listed patch files. I have seen some open source scripts like phpbb allow this. They list changed files and patch files which you can download to upgrade from one release to another. In the download it only includes these and no files that haven’t been touched. I believe I like this method the best but I just haven’t mastered svn enough to figure out how to make a release like this available.
Even though keeping a script up to date is the responsibility of the user I believe the script developers are the ones that should be looking for ways to make it easier on the users. If any one wants to share any tips that they think would make it easier then please do.
