Hello
I'm very interested in Silverstripe, i like its simplicity / flexibility.
But there is something that make me feel uncomfortable, i hope i will get an answer about all that :

Silverstripe 2.4.4 has a critical bug concerning PageComments, wich is completely broken (comments are tied to the wrong article.)
There is the corresponding issue :
http://open.silverstripe.org/ticket/6304

It has been fixed for 2.4.5 BUT :
- i saw no announcements concerning this critical bug on the site. Well, all people that have upgraded their site to the latest silverstripe version have broke their comments system, this is actually a huge issue :-/
- i saw no announcements to prevent people from this bug or tell theme to add a specific patch to solve the issue etc... So i guess newcomers download silverstripe 2.4 et, like i did, lose their temper triyng hard to understand what they've done wrong or triyng to fix themselves the issue (it took me 3 hours to understand that i did nothing wrong and to try to fix myself this issue)
- nobody answers my question on the ticket, about why this bug has been so long to detect and fix ?
- silverstripe 2.4.4 is still in download and not silverstripe 2.4.5, so people continue to download a buggy release :-(

Maybe there si something to do to prevent this to happen again ?

Silverstripe is a huge framework, my intent is only to discuss about that, to understand better how silverstripe manages all those things.

Hey pong - these are good points - but remember that this is all free (and with BSD licence)!
Try using magento and trying to get help from anyone!
I've not used drupal or joomla - but I'd guess that the advice is to use an old stable version and when you upgrade take care to test everything.

Hello
"Hey pong - these are good points - but remember that this is all free (and with BSD licence)!
Try using magento and trying to get help from anyone! "

I know (i use only open source projects for my web dev, mainly modx revolution and drupal for now) but what about creating an announcement when something like that is happening (with a link to the patch solving the issue - http://open.silverstripe.org/changeset/115399 -) ?

The main point for me is that people that are downloading for now 2.4.4 don't even know this bugs exists.

are you subscribed to the RSS feeds ss produce? on the google groups?

I get an email when there is a release, that release details all the bug fixes and ids. I watch the dev group. etc.

there is also the roadmap - http://open.silverstripe.org/roadmap this shows whats currently being worked on and what is coming

I think they have their own internal bug tracking - so issues can be raised on "open", mirrored internally, fixed and the open section not updated.

All in all I think that there are many holes to pick, but mainly silverstripe is maintained in an excellent way.

As a final point you could always add a comment in the "Release & Anoucnments" or "Upgrading" sections to reflect your experiences that would alert others who do not care to search "open" for tickets against the release they are downloading"

"but mainly silverstripe is maintained in an excellent way. "

I'm not saying silverstripe is maintained in a bad way ;-) Issue has been solved et patch commited, so that's perfectly okay for the code part.

But nothing on the site can prevent someone to download this buggy release, i just think that for those special cases, a news would be a good point. Once again, in my opinion, this is a big bug for a silverstripe's user, not a minor bug. And this is hard to find it reading tickets...

Once again, i'm really impressed by silverstripe cms, i just want to share my questions and ideas about that .

edit : i was not aware that there was a google group with a rss feed. When i came on silverstripe site, i only saw the "news section" and rss for blogs.

Hello pong! Sorry that you had such a bad experience with this release. In general, we try to find a good balance between releasing code fast, and maintaining consistent quality in releases (which means the release process takes quite a bit of effort itself). I agree that this is critical enough to warrant a new release sooner rather than later, most likely next week.

As a rule of thumb, if you really want to assess the risk of updating to a release, you have to look through open bugs against the next unreleased milestone. Thats software development :) By the way, you can subscribe by RSS to custom queries in trac, e.g. all "critical"/"blocker" bugs against the "cms" or "sapphire" components.

an old-fashioned mailing list would actually be really useful for me. I'd subscribe in a heartbeat.

There are mailing lists for documentation, core dev and release announcements, check out those google groups to keep in the loop, but they are more for high level discussions. General questions should be directed to IRC or the forum, adding in more streams would just make things harder to find things!