Comments on: Dear Matt/Automattic/Akismet

By: Smokey

Smokey — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 23:15:34 +0000

The WordPress Blog has a post about the Changelog feature, too.

Thanks to Peter Westwood for his work on the feature and for the aforementioned high-profile post about it last week.

By: Smokey

Smokey — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:52:28 +0000

Thanks, Alex, for getting the changelog up for Akismet—and so quickly, too! Since “everyone” uses Akismet, I hope that seeing the changelog there will help remind other plugin authors to include one with their releases.

You’re right, release notes/changelogs aren’t often riveting reading, but they are important, and I really appreciate the fact that Akismet has been posting changes on the blog all along and will be keeping the new plugin changelog accurate and up-to-date going forward. Thanks again!

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:55:09 +0000

Hi Smokey,

We have been posting detailed release notes on the Akismet blog, as you eventually found, but we inexplicably overlooked the new plugin changelog system.

Akismet now has a changelog here, where it should be.

I can’t promise it’ll make interesting reading, but I promise we’ll keep it accurate and up to date.

By: Simon

Simon — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 05:36:45 +0000

Agreed – well-written release notes are something far too many projects lack. All too often, the only way to find out what a patch-release has changed is to download it and try to make sense of a Changelog file generated from SVN commit logs.

Some Gnome packages provide separate ‘changes’ and ‘news’ files, which is good – the former is the full commit history since the last release, while the latter is a much-summarised version, stuff like “Fixed crasher bug when XYZ” or “Translation updates for Turkish”. If only more did that.

By: Dave Miller

Dave Miller — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 05:07:32 +0000

Hear hear! I was just thinking this myself as I upgraded a bunch of plugins on my wordpress the other day.