How to deal with product version numbers?

Question

This is not an obvious issue at the time of launching this Q&A site, but how do you / we plan on dealing with ExpressionEngine version numbers?

For over a dozen years, nearly all of our customers have been in the Software industry, and in most cases, each has made this mistake when planning to launch product support portals. It then becomes a real challenge, when launching new major versions, that are so fundamentally different from previous versions.

Questions being asked right now, are obviously and most likely related to the current stable release of EE. So, answers are software version specific. Imagine if this site were launched during the EE 1.7.x life cycle, how confusing it would be to mix EE 1.x with EE 2.x questions.

I worry that without specifying the(major, not point release) version numbers, the content will get muddled over time, and good advise now could be bad advise later.

I wouldn't advocate requiring version number tags for each question, as the list of tags is already quite large, and the onus shouldn't be on the user to rambler to tag by version (should be the platform handling this).

So is there a way in StackExchange to create some sort of version subcategories/ subsections? Does anyone else see this as a potential issue down the line?

Answer 1

Also remember that the original user doesn't have to tag the post; other users can come along and retag. So perhaps just have an unofficial policy/guideline/best practice that says, if you see a question that mentions a specific version, or clearly applies to a specific version, go ahead and retag the question?

Answer 2

So is there a way in StackExchange to create some sort of version subcategories/ subsections?

Nope.

I see that many folks have been use the ee2 tag. Tags are likely the best way to do this. Perhaps we should be encouraging people to include this tag with all posts? (Especially as I don't think EE3 is too too far off.)

Answer 3

I definitely think using the ee2 tag is a great start. However, I worry that with the sometimes sweeping changes that come about in the codebase, we might want to encourage tagging version numbers too, perhaps something to the tune of ee2, ee254, or something of the like. Obviously we can encourage people to specify the version of EE in their replies, but tagging it might help a future user looking for information regarding legacy versions.

Of course, we could also adjust titles to have the version number there, too.

I dunno, I just foresee minor point releases being a problem going further.