WordPress.org is currently taking it’s WordPress 2014 survey. Now is the chance to have your say, sort of. After 20-odd check box questions, I finally got 1 text-area box to expound on what I really think, and I did:
Q.22 No, I do not use the Android App, because the last time I tried it, it was missing necessary functions. I needed to delete an obsolete contact form 7 immediately from a page, and this was not possible using the App. I remembered that the Dashboard itself has been responsive since this past January, and I was able to complete my task from the field (deleting the contact form from the page) successfully.
Quite often, I spend time teaching people WordPress using screen sharing. I don’t even bother mentioning the WordPress App. I just grab the corner of the browser and show them the Dashboard responding.
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Since you are not giving me space in Q.23 to elaborate (unless it comes after the Continue button (warning, it did not), I will do so here. I am ok with the WordPress core updating itself between minor numbers if you are. I am not ok with auto-updates of plugins and themes — because there are some that are still not compatible with ~each other~ and will crash ~each other~. For example, I use the Ex-Ray theme a lot, and I use the Google Translate plugin a lot, but I can NOT do NOT use them together in the same website, because for whatever reason, the Google Translate plugin will spew the content of an Ex-Ray themed website all over the place.
Likewise, the most recent update to the premium theme Tanjun is NOT compatible with WordPress 4.0. Walking a customer through his new WordPress site, we backed up and carefully stepped through updating all his plugins and inactive themes, and then the Tanjun theme prompted us separately for its own update. Boom, the white screen of death. The site was restored before the call ended, but for the next customer that had that situation, I refused to update his Tanjun theme, until compatibility could be verified. He was quite angry about it. Politics politics.
So I see Automattic has bought BruteProtect, and I like BruteProtect and use it on almost all of my own sites. I would LOVE for BruteProtect to scan my sites for malware, but it will not do this unless I allow it to also auto-update my plugins & themes, and this I refuse to do. When you (Automattic) finally close the deal with BruteProtect, please, please, separate the scanning for malware function from the auto-updating function.
Don’t get me wrong – I use InfinteWP to update dozens of my own sites at once, but I have to, have to, be sitting and watching and supervising all updates, so I can do restores ASAP. If anything goes wrong with an auto-update, I don’t want to find out about it the next day.
WordPress is a lot more robust than it used to be with updates. But it is not, and I believe cannot ever be, 100% fool proof, because non-Automattic themes and plugins can be incompatible with each other, and there are so many, there is no way to know which until it happens to you.
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