Wordpress Upgraded to 2.5

April 12th, 2008 | by Scott

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I’ve been putting this off all week because I was still recovering from adding the new theme a few weeks back where I had to fight with half of the dozen plugins I have installed to get everything working right. I just wasn’t ready to dive into another battle with them until today.

I’m happy to say though that the upgrade went pretty smooth for me. Once I got the files and database upgraded (just uploaded and ran the updater, real simple) I activated my custom theme and it worked perfectly.

Then I began activating all my plugins, one at a time to make sure they worked and didn’t break anything.

All but one activated without a hitch. One that didn’t was aLinks, which is something I installed a while back because it looked like an easy way to automatically convert certain words that I link from often in posts, like hosting or domain registrar, also I had the idea to use it for creating a mini-library of definition pages for terms I use often like marketing, SEO, articles and etc.–but I never got around to actually setting it all up anyway, so having it break with the upgrade isn’t really a big deal.

I also scrapped the Related Posts plugin because I wanted to begin including related post links into my RSS feed and couldn’t get it to work from that plugin.

I found WordPress Related Posts does this for you without having to edit anything in the feeds.php file, you just install it, activate it and in the settings select a checkbox to add related post links to your RSS feed. Super easy… I love that.

All in all the whole thing took me under an hour, and I really like the new wordpress administration section. It’s a lot more user friendly, though a few little things seem odd now such as the settings for plugins seem like they should be under the plugins menu rather than the overall blog settings menu now. But I suppose that’s something plugin creators will have to decide for themselves to do over time.

I also like that wordpress has integrated avatars into the comments now, though it’s a shame they’re limited to gravatar and aren’t including mybloglog or a few others like some plugins do. Not that there’s anything wrong with gravatar, but it doesn’t seem to have the same user levels (based on what I’m seeing) as some of the other options so a lot of blogs now have generic gray avatar images all over them.

Maybe since wordpress has integrated gravatar though the participation levels there will rise and this won’t be an issue down the road. Time will tell.

If you’ve been putting off doing the upgrade on your own blog I’d say make the time and just do it. It’s not hard at all and the new layout and features are pretty good. It’s also more secure to keep your blog up to date.

Just remember to backup your site files and database before doing the upgrade just in-case you do have some problems, that way it’s easy to roll back and keep your site online while you work them out.

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