The Importance of Version Release Dates for Sitecore

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I recently ran into an issue while implementing a site on Sitecore 7.1.  I searched the interwebs for an existing solution to my issue, and discovered a number of posts identifying the same issue for the initial release of 7.0.  All of these posts indicated that the issue was resolved in Update 3 of Sitecore 7.0.  I kept beating my head against the wall wondering why my 7.1 Initial Release implementation was having this issue.  (After all, 7.1 is greater than 7.0 right?  Thus, my 7.1 implementation shouldn’t have a problem since Update 3 of 7.0 fixed it already.)  Finally I decided to put a support ticket into Sitecore, and my friend Yuriy from Sitecore Support helped me understand the issue.  Basically, I had to upgrade from 7.1 Initial Release to 7.1 Update 1 – which “includes the fixes from Sitecore 7.0 Updates 3 and 4”.
Confused?  Don’t worry, it took me a minute.  The faulty logic I was using was that 7.1 had to have come after 7.0 (and all of its updates), but the change Sitecore made to their releases last year doesn’t support that.  Look at the dates of the releases (posted in chronological order) and you’ll see what I’m talking about:

You can see above that Sitecore is continuing to update “older” versions after the release of a higher major version. The moral of the story is – don’t rely simply upon the revision (or even major version) of Sitecore that you’re working with to indicate feature / fixes from previous versions – you have to pay attention to the release dates!