Long Term Support

[Tyler Cassidy]

While I think it's cool for you guys to always be incorporating new features all the time and at such a fast pace I think it would be also nice if there was older versions of the suite that still have updates for bug fixes only much like php as an example with 5.5 & 5.6 bug fix releases when 7.0 is now out.

For example there is still updates to 3.4, but why not 4.0 & soon 4.1 when 4.2 comes out? A lot of us don't really care about new features once we have our websites launched live and setup the way we like. It can be quite a hassle every time we update because it's a security fix and then we're dealing with new features that sometimes break theme templates, etc. taking more time out of our days when all we care about is bug and security fixes.

While it would take a bit more work backporting fixes from for example 4.1 back to 4.0 & changes to the update software I think you might see less support tickets coming in because I imagine quite a few people would stick with older bug fix only releases until the current version has matured a bit.

Thoughts?

 

[Lindy]

Thanks for the feedback, Tyler. I can certainly understand why some might prefer to get only what they need by way of bug fixes. IPS4 isn't engineered in a way that makes "patching" terribly efficient. Further, our development moves at such a swift pace, it would really slow things down to set breakpoints and fix the same bugs twice. Finally, upgrades in IPS4 are becoming so seamless, apart from theme differences - there's really little reason not to upgrade. 

Regarding theme changes - we do try to minimize impact as much as possible. IPS4.1 was a bit of a different case because IPS4 is a new platform that required some underlying engineering changes. Moving forward, we're going to do our best to keep changes as minimally invasive as possible, noting that sometimes, it's simply unavoidable. 

At this time, we believe limiting support to the current version is the best way forward for us, however, we appreciate the feedback and hope you'll find your concerns about upgrading become less of a concern in the future.