14 DAY TRIAL // In a blog post from WordPress, blog users have been informed that the 2.0.X branch has been declared deprecated and no more security updates will be available from now on. Even if WordPress officially committed to sustaining security improvements and porting many modern features in the 2.0.X editions, the monumental task has overwhelmed WP programmers that have decided to call it quits.
This decision comes four month before the 2.0.X branch was planned to be officially retired from development and security upgrades implementation. Because of the huge leap, WordPress took with the 2.7 and 2.8 branches many older editions until 2.5 that seemed to be doomed in the near future.
The large amount of new security upgrades and huge plugin, theme and widget databases have contributed to the demise of the 2.0.X branch. Plugin implementation and feature re-works for the older version of WP has flooded development duties so much, that many programmers just gave up and went to work on newer branches.
Facing this lack of personnel, lack of time and a huge amount of work that didn’t really make sense anymore, the management took a drastic step and decided to officially announce the series as deprecated. This will not affect many of the users, since the big mass of bloggers already uses a modern and more recent release.
Mark Jaquith, lead developer for WordPress, issued the following statement on the official WordPress blog: “I’m disappointed that we weren’t able to keep the branch maintained until 2010, but since one of the big reasons for that failure was the massive scope of our security improvements for the newer versions of WordPress, 2.0.x doesn’t die in vain.”
Regarding the huge amount of work that would have been necessary, Mark added that, “Porting those changes to the 2.0.x branch would have been a monumental task and could have introduced instability or new bugs.”
Newer versions of WordPress can be found here.