Navid Azimi posted the fol­low­ing in a com­ment on the ini­tial Dash­lite announce­ment post:

This seems like a good imple­men­ta­tion and def­i­nitely has it’s uses but for most admin­is­tra­tors this could actu­ally be more detri­men­tal in the long run than ini­tially expected. The pri­mary idea behind the Dash­board was to allow all Word­Press Admin­is­tra­tors to stay informed regard­ing devel­op­ments in the community.

Many WP users (or any com­mu­nity for that mat­ter) install and sit. Often times being obliv­i­ous to new ver­sions and (most impor­tantly) secu­rity updates. This sort of unpatched soft­ware can be detri­men­tal not only to your web­host, and your web­site, but also to the entire web com­mu­nity itself.

For exam­ple, when phpBB was exploited with a major secu­rity flaw — there was a major defi­ciency in con­tact­ing all admin­is­tra­tors regard­ing the secu­rity hole. The prob­lem is twofold. The more you pro­mote the secu­rity hole, the eas­ier it becomes for mali­cious users to exploit unpatched instal­la­tions. You see where I am going here.

Of course — right now — in the prime heat of your blog you feel that you are check­ing wordpress.org every­day and you’re prob­a­bly skim­ming the forums daily too. There is no way you’ll miss any updates. But as time goes on and you have tweaked, retweaked and redesigned your web­site five times you’ll real­ize that its time for your blog to push bet­ter con­tent and not just look pret­tier. And its then when you sim­ply stop keep­ing up with every nightly or read­ing the forums daily.

Then again, I could be com­pletely wrong.

I kind of felt that this required a response more pub­licly than the con­tin­u­a­tion of the com­ment thread would per­mit, hence this post­ing. Read the rest of this entry »