Rob's Blog

Well I’ve just completed an upgrade of this server to the latest version of WordPress, version 2.1. So what’s different? Any new features? Anything broken? Was it worth the hassle?

First of all, the upgrade procedure was extremely quick and painless. Following the instructions here was a snip; after taking a full backup of my files and database I copied the new files up to the server and ran the upgrade script. I was expecing it to take ages; but no, it was done in seconds. Then again I haven’t exactly written much on this blog, have I?

However, it hasn’t been all plain sailing. First of all, upon reactivating my plugins, one of them broke my front page – a plugin called “Front Page Filter”. Fortunately I wasn’t really using this plugin so disabling it hasn’t caused me any pain, but if you’re planning on upgrading your own blog I do suggest checking your plugins first – or even working with a beta copy of your site (remember you can have multiple WordPress installations pointing at the same database!).

Next up is my Links page – it’s now gone! I had to take this page down as it brings up a MySQL error when trying to parse my blogroll within WordPress. I’m not sure what the problem is here so will investigate further a bit later.

One of the most interesting things for me was the addition of a spell-check enabled rich text editor – however on my installation (under Firefox at least – I haven’t confirmed in IE) the rich text editor has actually completely failed to work; I’m stuck with editing raw HTML! Not a problem for me, but for all those non-techie bloggers out there this is going to be a major problem.

Now after all this complaining you might have got the impression that I have nothing good to say about the new WordPress upgrade at all! This isn’t the case. I’m not going to go into all the changes here – there’s too many to list – so I’ll just link to WordPress’s own documentation on this here. But among the highlights are not only all the bug fixes but a lot of work done to the back-end admin side (making it a lot more pretty for your average administrator) and a bunch of improvements to the MySQL code to improve performance.

So, is the upgrade worth it? Well, for me, I don’t think so right now. I’ve still got a couple of issues with my installation – things that used to work don’t and a lot of the new features don’t work for me – so I need to work out how to fix these before giving a considered view. As with most things though, it’s often best to wait a few weeks before jumping in – let others make the mistakes and wait for them to get fixed! Or if you’re adventurous, try setting up a beta version of your blog and run both side-by-side – something I’m going to have a go at in the near future.

So there you have it! Rob’s verdict? Wait a few weeks and test thoroughly before moving! Right, Spurs vs Arsenal is on Sky Sports 1 HD now and my pizza has just turned up, so that’s it for my first post for a good few weeks.