By Gabriel Princewill-
A new word press support for jQuery Migrate has caused the broken sites of over 50,000 publishers, Godaddy has confirmed.
An issue with how themes handle pagination created costly damage to thousands of sites after word press updated its themes to 5.5 about a week ago, the global company said. The revelation came as our organisation probed the problem which also affected The Eye Of Media.Com .
The modifications made by word press meant we had to wait a few days for the situation to be rectified by Godaddy’s word press premium service, who routinely charge a fee for fixing word press issues.
On this occasion, Godaddy fixed the problem without additional charge, after thoughtfully taking some of the past issues we have experienced due to technical defects in the past. The damage led to missing articles on our site, and the complete disappearance of our menu tab.
The new instalment by word press, notorious for being directly inaccessible, set back several publishers who were unaware of the cause, until some of them contacted Godaddy. Godaddy hosts countless websites around the world built on word press .
Godaddy also revealed that many publishers affected by the changes instituted by word press were forced to pay extra money to their respective online developers, in order to address the issue, and avoid the prolonged consequences, including affected revenues.
Credibility
Damage of this nature is bad for the credibility of any publishing site, and could in some cases have irreparable consequences on ratings and traffic. More so because several thousands of potential new subscribers could be driven away from a site for good when they notice anomalies that appear to signal incompetence and sub-optimal standards.
This kind of disruption caused by changes to word press themes, has occurred at least a couple of times in the past to our knowledge. There could be more instances we are unaware of. However, it calls for closer inspection of the operation of word press, in terms of assessing the efficacy of their operations.
Responsibility
Explaining the problem which also affected The eye of media last week, Go daddy explained:
”Third party applications, also known as plugins on WordPress, are the responsibility of the customer to keep up to date as some plugins require paid subscriptions from their developers to get the latest update. The Managed part of this platform is WordPress, the core software that does not have plugins added in just as you would download from wordpress.org”.
jQuery Migrate is a library that acts like a bridge for older code to function on WordPress. The change was expected to be beneficial to sites across the world. Godaddy also explained that older themes used by publishers can create compatibility issues eventually creep in and that’s what happened with WordPress 5.5.
”JavaScript are little machines that make things work. The scripts work behind the scenes to make forms, search bars, and drop down menus work, Godaddy continued.
Word press are hardly contactable directly, and appear to take no responsibility for damage caused by changes they make .
Direct Relationship
Godaddy has been advised to establish a direct relationship with word press in order to facilitate more timely communication with them when disruptions occur. However, the global company says their policy forbids them from interacting with third parties.
Publishers should not have to suffer serious inconveniences each time word press updates their theme, and theme modifications ought to be kept to their minimum.