Upgrade WP 2.5 OMG!
UPDATE: WordPress 2.5 Delayed — According WordPress Trac, 2.5 is delayed by a week or even more while work is being done on styling, bug fixes and open tickets. You can read all about it in this post.
EEEEKK! in the Blog Herald Lorelle VanFossen prompts WordPress users to get prepared for the pending upgrade and I start to panic:
“I recently asked if you were ready for WordPress 2.5, but let’s go through the steps to prepare your blog for upgrading to the new version next week. ” Continue Reading »
When it came to 2.3 we had an emergency security patch scenario not once but thrice (October, December and February).Now we are faced with another upgrade and just reading all the instructions make my eyes cross and my palms sweat.
At one time WordPress was purported to be easy software to set up, maintain and use. Technically skilled bloggers do move back and forth between wordpress.com and wordpress.org all the time but this is not so when it comes to the non-geeky bloggers. I heard that the transition only required only a little ftp. Yeah sure. One visit to the wordpress.org support forums is guaranteed to send the technically challenged hightailing out of there whimpering.
Bless you for preparing the instructions Lorelle but I’m not ready for this upgrade.
“Yo! Root where the hell are you?” she sobbed.
Mar 9th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
ugh, i can see why you’d be panic-ing after reading lorelle’s post.
#1 - you don’t need to worry about your theme, there are no known compatibility issues with themes. as far as plugins, i’d recommend you wait to upgrade until your plugins have compatible versions. You can usually upgrade your plugins _before_ upgrading wordpress, so that you know they work beforehand
#3 - that plugin was written for the upgrade from 2.2 to 2.3 - i don’t see why it was included in the list
#4 - i’d recommend _deleting_ unused plugins before upgrading, so that you can just activate all the remaining plugins after the upgrade.
(which makes #5 irrelevant)
#6 - absolute hogwash, has nothing to do with upgrading
#7 - you can do this through your control panel, no need to muck around with plugins or PHPMyAdmin
Mar 9th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
the other thing to keep in mind is that will minor “point” releases (2.3.1, 2.3.2, 2.3.3, etc.) are security/bug releases. the major releases (2.2, 2.3, 2.5, etc.) are as much as possible for features only.
Mar 9th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
According to Carl at Defensio, they are not compatible with 2.5 yet but hope to be very soon. I suspect they always wait to finalize things until after an upgrade is released (a very good idea) because you never know what wordpress is going to change at the last moment.
Mar 9th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Sharethis also appears to be incompatible at the moment. I have an email in to them.
Mar 10th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
@Adam and Richard
Thanks for the encouraging words and explanations that you have provided, guys. I think I may have over-reacted a bit {redfaced}.
I’m feeling calmer now. I’m willing to wait until the early adopters make the adjustment first, experience anything “wonky” that may lead to fixing and, until the plugins are updated for compatibility with 2.5.
Adam - thanks for explaining re: minor point (security/bug) releases and major (features) releases to me.
Richard - Thanks for undertaking the initiative re: plugins.
Mar 15th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
I have been trying out the nightly builds for the past three weeks and watching things come together quite nicely.
The main difference you can see is with the admin area — a whole new design.
The original color scheme put publicized a couple of months ago has changed back from the red/pink to blue.
If you are running themes in WP 2.3, then they will run just as well in WP 2.5. The only thing that will really change with themes is the Gravatar support.
Plugins are another matter. MOST of the plugins I use work just fine in WP 2.5. Rule of thumb is if you have been updating plugins as new versions come out, then you are ready for WP 2.5.
I have run across a couple that have given me some problems: WP-Sticky 1.10 by Lester Chan will lock out all of the posts if you activate it. WP-chgFontSize 1.5 by Ferran Rodenas will activate but will not do anything.
But all of the other plugins that ran in WP 2.3 will probably run in Wp 2.5 without any problems.
Mar 17th, 2008 at 9:39 am
The other major change from the admin point of view will be admin area color schemes in 2.5 and the fact that you can use plugins to change the layout and color schemes.
Mar 24th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Wolf has 2.5 running but not on his blog. He installed it locally using MAMP and wrote a post on it
http://wolfshowl.com/2008/03/18/wordpress-25/