Page 7: WordPress 2.5 Guide Final Thoughts
I’ve read a lot of reviews and posts about WordPress 2.5, but none of them gave me the information I just gave you – so I didn’t have enough information to make an educated decision on whether or not to upgrade yet. I took a chance, and I’m glad I did, because the new style and interface rocks!
Let’s recap reasons to upgrade:
- Enhanced layout of Dashboard home, including ability to add RSS feeds
- Comments now support “Gravatars”
- Improved comment moderation notifications
- Media upload and management with new “Media Library” functions
- Tag Management
- Write “lookup” button
No upgrade is ever perfect, and I’m sure that you (and I) will have some questions after upgrading to WordPress 2.5 that I didn’t cover in this guide. That’s ok – I’ve already thought about that. I want you to bookmark this link right now: Answers to Questions about WordPress version 2.5. Thanks to MichaelH, that’s a list of all the questions and answers from email lists right after people ugraded to WordPress 2.5 for the first time. I’m sure that page will help you a lot for the first few weeks.
I hope you enjoyed this guide, and as always – if you have something to add to make it better (something I forgot?) or a question – please comment now! See you tomorrow for the next WordPress hack!
Comments
My day job is a Test Engineer so I don’t trust developers =)~ . I personally would like to see how my blog fares with major releases by creating a copy of my production blog into a test site and upgrade that test site to WordPress 2.5.
After upgrading, I found out first hand that I had a problem with easy gravatars, lazyest gallery, popularity contest, link harvester, and my own NowThen Photo Display plugin. So many things broke at once. Luckily I was also able debug and fix my blog in the background without visitors seeing all the issues.
I’ve outline the necessary steps to create a test blog here.
It’s totally worth it if you have many visitors to your site.
Thaya Kareesons last blog post..Make WP-PostViews Work with WP-Super-Cache
A well done guide/review!
Thanks for the notes plugin. I like that. Otherwise I never use the dashboard. This will help me stay a little more organized. . . and lord how I need that.
I’m still not fond of the layout of the menus in WP 2.5. Luckily lighter menus (it’s in the wordpress extensions) plugin has been upgraded to work with 2.5. I like this plugin. It gives you drop down menus–everything one click away.
I do agree with Thaya. I’ve heard a lot of things broke with 2.5 however, since I’m new to wordpress I’ve only installed plugins that are 2.5 ready. I didn’t have much going on in 2.3.3. So things have gone smoothly for me. For those who have a mass amount of plugins, get the upgraded ones. . . if they exist.
That will always be a problem with open source projects. They rely on the community to put a lot of features in via plugin and sooner or later that person will get tired of working on the plugin =(
One reason I keep my plugins to a minimun.
I think it is a worth while upgrade esp if you don’t have a ton of plugins.
I’ve heard the auto upgrade for plugins can cause problems but it has worked for me flawlessly. . . remember I carry only about 15 plugins =;;
I upgraded to 2.5 just after it came out and it has been working perfectly for me. . . knock on wood!
Charles
I usually install all the updates on my local machine and tests all the plugins. When I am satisfied with all of the related themes and plugins, I copy all the files to to my live server.
I upgraded to 2.5 and it is working perfectly right for me.
Shafiq Rehmans last blog post..TP-LINK TD-W8920G Wireless ADSL2 Router Review
Nice post….:)
But Instead of doing manual upgradation i recommend to use Automatic Upgrade plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-automatic-upgrade/)….:D
it’s very easy to use ….and i does all the pre and post upgrade tasks…
I upgraded one of my blog using it and it took me just 1 minute to do upgradation
That’s a popular plugin, but one that I would never recommend for most people. You have to check the compatible plugin list every time before upgrading, just to be sure you don’t have a big conflict. If that plugin could do an automatic check of that list before upgrading, I might think about it. For now, the safest way to upgrade is manually…
I would also suggest downloading the xampplite package. It is basically a no install apache / mysql self setup local website.
This gives you the luxury of running your own local copy of your website, so you can test upgrades or code changes locally before uploading for the world to see.
Tarkan
I really like the local testing idea! I might give that a shot one of these days.