Word Press 2
For those of you who use WordPress, I’m sure you’re aware that version 2 has been released.
I’m usually one of the first people to jump on the bandwagon, but this time I’ve decided to wait. Why you ask? Why, Jafer, oh why have you not upgraded to this new and improved blogging tool?
Well those of you who’ve known me for quite some time will remember back to all the times I’ve upgraded and something’s gone wrong. And then I’ve created entirely new databases, in new directories, to start all over again.
Then I’ve had to contact everyone and say, “can you change my link to Idiotonastick slash/ wp, slash/ blog, slash/ journal, slash/ talk”. I wanted to save everyone that trouble and wait until all the bugs are worked out. And I wanted to save me the piss off of having no more archives if I have to start off another database.
Apparently the changes in the new version are quite extensive. These are stolen directly from their site:
- Completely Redesigned Backend — The first thing you’ll notice when you login to your blog is the backend has been completely overhauled for both aesthetics and usability. This is the first iteration of exciting things to come from the Shuttle team of designers that has been volunteering their time, and look for even more aesthetic improvements in the future.
- Faster Administration — Call it AJAX, call it DHTML, call it Larry, but we’ve paid close attention to streamlining some of the most common tasks in managing your blog. For example if you’re writing a post and you can add categories on the fly, much like tagging in Flickr. Also instead of having two separate UIs for “simple” and “advanced” posting, we’ve combined them and let you customize the layout of the page on the fly by dragging and dropping the dialogs around. It saves where you put things so when you return it’s just like you left it. When you delete a comment or category it will fade out without a page load.
- WYSIWYG Editing — WP dev Andy Skelton and the TinyMCE team have done a tremendous amount of work to bring a smooth WYSIWYG editing experience to WordPress. As code purists, we are very picky about what kind of HTML is generated, and while it’s not perfect yet (for instance nested lists can cause trouble) for 95% of what you do post-to-post the WYSIWYG should save you time. And if it doesn’t, you can turn it off on your profile page. One note: Safari and older versions of Opera, both fantastic browsers, don’t yet support everything that’s needed to do WYSIWYG, but we fully expect new versions of those browsers will continue to improve their standards support, so it may just be a matter of time.
- Included Spam and Backup Plugins — We’ve included two of the most popular WordPress plugins: Skippy’s DB backup can backup your database to a file and optionally email you a copy; Akismet is a distributed anti-spam system which gets smarter the more people use it.
- Resizable Editing — This is one of my personal favorite features. Ever been writing a post and that textarea seemed a little small? Happens to me all the time, and our new rich text editor includes a feature that lets you resize the editor on-the-fly by clicking on the corner, just like a regular window.
- Inline Uploading — We’ve optimized our uploader for image, audio, and video files and put it inline with the posting screen. You don’t have to bounce around any more when writing a post! It also will organize your files for you as you upload them to make them easier to find later. On the backend, each uploaded file is actually a “sub-post” so it can have individual comments and pingbacks, its own permalink, and even a custom template based on what type of file it is. You can click on attached files to get a menu of options, or if you’re on Firefox you can drag and drop them into your WYSIWYG editor.
- Faster Posting — In the past if you were linking to a number of posts or pinging a lot of update services, your posting time could appear to slow to a crawl even though everything was instantly done on the backend. We’ve modified how this works now so posting should be near-instantaneous, like everything else in WordPress.
- Post Preview — Another enhancement to the post screen, now when you save a post it shows a live preview of how the post would look on your site, with the stylesheet and theme and everything. No more publishing a post just to see if it works.
- Streamlined Importing — We’ve rewritten our import system from the ground up to be much easier to use (you no longer have to edit files), put it behind authentication, and also made it easy for new importers to be dropped into the system, much like plugins.
- User Roles — We had a ton of feedback on our old numerical user level system. No one was exactly sure what those numbers meant! We’ve distilled the basic functions into a set of roles — such as administrator, editor, contributor — that make it easier to understand what sort of capabilities you’re giving your blog’s users. The new system is completely pluggable too, so plugins can modify roles and create groups that have access to certain things.
- Header Customization — If you’re tired of the blue header in the default theme, you can now change the colors and text of it, which we’ve included as a demo of some of the new features available to theme authors.
So that’s tons of changes to the new “Duke” version and that doesn’t even cover the developer changes they’ve added too.
But you know when the actual creators warn you about upgrading, you’d better be good and prepared before you decide that you’re going for it.
Before you upgrade from an earlier version, remember that this is a major release and thousands of lines of code have changed. Before upgrading it’s always good, just in case, to make a backup of your database and WordPress files. It only takes a few minutes and gives you a total safety net if for whatever reason things don’t work. It is also probably a good idea to turn off your plugins, and activate them one-by-one after you’ve upgraded.
And since I just got some of my plugins working again after changing to the Wuhan template, I figure I might as well be staying with 1.5 for a while.
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Comments
I have no idea who Ryan is other than an IP in Virginia. At first I thought he was upset about the subject matter, only after so much writing did I realize that he probably doesn’t give a flying farg about the topic, just wants to have a little religious rant.
I had no trouble (except for the comment number glitch which was caused by Spam Karma) with the upgrade. I backed up my database, not files because my theme is a clean package, and everything else is in either wp-content (which you don’t need to delete) or my-content (extra folder). All my plugins work.
The first thing I did was turn the WYSIWYG off, though. Made me relive the shock I had when I saw XP for the first time (back then I immediately changed the pudgy blue theme to something leaner).
Minna, you have no trouble with any of that stuff cuz you’re a fricking genius… unlike me. I’ll still just wait til I feel good and brave, and lookup on the codex how to do the backup again 
idiotonastick
Minna
Dave Barker
I used Moneris for over two years. I recently terminated due to a merchant compliance requiremen t – Moneris began...
Maria
just another
Female, taken, fire, Sagittarius, Monkey, Toronto, two kids, one grandson, IT.
55
is the new 30. I want the world to close their mouths when they’re eating or chewing gum. If they don’t, I want to elbow them in the face.
I think I’ll wait a while also…
Who’s your religious friend, by the way? You’ve certainly stirred him up!