Usability: Understanding the Tools / Forums / Upgrade tab

[jrf]

I've got a few questions about the Tools -> Forums "Upgrade" tab from a usability perspective.

On a brand new bbPress install, i.e. the tables have just been created and are still (mostly) empty, the tab displays and lists a number of actions.
Running each of these actions - of course - gives "nothing to do" responses, but the actions are not taken off the page.

1. Why do actions display when they will have no effect / are unnecessary to run ?
2. Why does the tab display when there are no actions which would have any effect ?

As a user, the tab feels like something I'd "need to do" as keeping up to date is important, but as the tab, nor the actions, do not go away after having run them, their importance is diminished.

For me, this would mean that I would in the future disregard the tab / not look at it again and not action anything on it (unless maybe specifically pointed to it through an admin notice).

This net effect seem to be to counter to the importance of keeping the database schema up to date and to have the opposite of the intended effect.

[johnjamesjacoby]

All good questions and observations.

The contents of the "Upgrade" tab mostly came out of the "Repairs" tab, as there were a number of routines that, while not destructive, only really needed to be ran to move certain pieces of data around when performing upgrades from one major version to another.

Originally some of the upgrades were under "Repair" but that wasn't really contextually accurate, so "Upgrades" was born using the same UI and underlying API to avoid inventing something new that basically had identical needs.

The reason they're even here in the first place, is because database upgrades do not run automatically on large forums as a safety precaution to avoid locking tables while it's all moved around. As you can probably imagine, the bulk of bbPress installations are middle-of-the-road sized sites that don't usually have multiple database servers to handle reads/writes, but still consider up-time critical to the success of their communities, so the current compromise is skip the automatic upgrade, and alert site admins that database upgrades are required.

The other reasons the details you mention aren't incorporated:

• largely because it's new in trunk
• I'd meant to add a version column to help differentiate the upgrade routines to run when upgrading to which versions
• We should switch all of these over to being WPCLI commands to start, and then use those commands in the GUI, instead of the way it is now, which is kinda the other way around (including "Repairs")

I really appreciate you looking at all of this. It's really helpful perspective, and you're finding all the unfinished things that keep holding releases back, so I also appreciate that you're willing/able to add patches as you get more familiar.

[johnjamesjacoby]

In 6664:

Tools: add optional description text to upgrade & repair tools.

This change hopefully adds some real-world context to otherwise mysterious functionality, in an attempt to better explain why any specific routine should be run vs. any others.

Trunk, for 2.6. See #3149.

[jrf]

@johnjamesjacoby Thanks for your response and the patch. Looks like an improvement. Will need to see if it's sufficient.

[johnjamesjacoby]

Some improvements went into 2.6. Let's see how they do for a bit.

Bumping to 2.8.