[calvinf]

WordPress is abandoning support for PHP4 and MySQL 4 in version 3.1. This will allow them to incorporate many of the features in PHP5 they haven't been able to do yet such as stronger OOP.

http://wordpress.org/news/2010/07/eol-for-php4-and-mysql4/

It doesn't need a rewrite. Instead, work with the many brilliant devs who have been improving it for years and know it inside-and-out -- including its flaws and areas for improvement.

[rickmb]

Oh, come on. WordPress could have started providing a decent API eons ago. They don't care. Or they fundamentally don't see there's anything wrong with spaghetti code and inconsistent API's.

The only reason they are abandoning PHP4 because it has become so rare they can't test against it anymore, not because they want to improve anything. Remember this crap: http://ma.tt/2007/07/on-php/ ?

Which is typical for WordPress: one of the most successful companies to be built on PHP, and all they do is bitch about it and use their influence on a part of the community to hold it back instead of contributing, like Facebook, Digg and such.

[calvinf]

As of writing this post, in WordPress's directory there are 11,351 plugins and 1,239 themes.

Source: http://wordpress.org/extend/

I'd call the API a success: it has thousands of authors releasing thousands of plugins and themes and this is only the code that's been released open-source.

[westi]

We have been providing a stable and reliable API for a long time.

Just because it doesn't look like how you envisage it should doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Matt's post was true at the time and WordPress.org the open source project has never been "holding back the php community". Instead we have been ensuring that the most important people, our users, are able to upgrade reliably and easily on whatever hosting platform they use.

In the end we put the users first because without them the project would just wither away!