Page 4: WordPress 2.5 Options or “Settings”
Previously your dashboard had a section entitled “Options” which has been moved to the top right in navigation and has been renamed to “Settings”. The main options seem pretty much the same:
What I did find new was under “Settings -> Discussion”, a new section for “Avatars”.
WordPress now utilizes “Gravatars” or “Globally Recognized Avatars”, and that’s why I saw the picture in the comments earlier when I approved it. The rest of the options seemed pretty much the same to me. As I went through “Plugins”, “Users”, and “Design” (used to be Presentation) I didn’t see any obvious changes other than styling.
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.
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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.
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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.