Used to be a master at WordPress knew everything there was to know in the admin panel and doing this and that. Now after 4-5 years of picking it back up and working with the new releases I’m totally lost. There’s so many options and plugins and widgets and all these other things that seemed like they never were there before.. Maybe it’s just me? Dedicating more time to it today, but just wanted to rant..

What’s the problem? its more powerful than ever

You just described the fundamental problem with Software As A Service — the developers can change it whenever they want, and if you don’t like it, you’re fucked — you can’t keep using the old version, unless "you" happen to be a huge corporation or the government and you can afford to pay the developers to keep the old version around just for you. This is why it’s better to buy software and install it on your personal machine, so you can keep it forever. Software As A Service is fundamentally flawed from the perspective of giving the user what the user wants — it’s all about keeping the product under the control of the developers at all times. Fuck that noise.

I know it’s just more confusing, but I do love it.

If you know PHP then it’s easy. I have a client who needs to keep a 2 year old version of WP because of the tie in with a inner office application.

All you do is just read what is updated, what is security, then patch it yourself.

Sometimes you have to rebuild the DB depending on the update. You could find someone to do this for a few hundred on a freelancer board.

If that is too much money then the owner or the client has a site that makes $0 yet wants to keep it up and running for whatever reason.

I’m trying to figure out WordPress because a new client site is using it and I have to add some new things. Coming from ExpressionEngine, the WordPress theming is straight confusing garbage.

At first it was very frustrating, but now I’m seeing how everything is linked together. It’s not all change this code and it’s done.. There’s sometimes multiple steps like change the code, change the menu settings, change the plug-in settings, and it all affects each thing and has to work together. I’m starting to master it again, feels really good to get back into it.