Place of Stuff

I have been watching the debate over at WordPress Wank over the whole “is WP a bulky bloated blog tool or a fairly medium CMS tool?” question. Well, it sort of began as “whoopee a WP project is included in Google’s Summer of Code” but where nerds and geek abound…..

Anyway, that is pretty much by the by and not what I want to talk about. Read from this comment onwards. Ryan makes the throwaway comment that if that girl again is unhappy with the extra bloaty versions coming out, that it’s just as easy to revert back to version 1.5 or earlier. Yes, yes, you and I and that girl all know that that’s bollocks, particularly with the fact that WP normally updates to fix security holes. So yes, one could revert. But then you’d end up with security holes everywhere, themes not working, plugins not working and a generally crap experience for all. So that’s not a goer. But then it struck me: WP is a bunch of text files. So with this being GPL software surely there must be a method where we can be told that “a hole in version x.x.x can be fixed by changing line 4 from whatever to whatever in comments.php and so on or by installing version x.x.x+1“. That’s a naff way of putting it, but I find upgrading the whole system to be a real PITA. I would much rather just change the relevant lines by hand (or download just the required files) because that way my downtime is reduced, I know what needs to be backed up (or I can just comment out the current lines with an annotation to say “did this on x date because of y reason” and then add in the changed line from new. This means that my plugins don’t need to be switched off, I don’t need to reinstall everything and risk it all breaking. Again. And, more importantly with this being GPL software, I know what the changes are and can decide how to implement them.

Does this sound reasonable? I know there are people out there with far more PHP experience and knowledge (there can’t be people with less, surely) and people who know the inner workings of WP. So would this work or would it break something else. Would the lessened load on the WP servers be a good thing for people who have to download the whole thing because of inexperience or their own needs? Or am I just light headed from lack of sleep?