Can you believe how far blogging has come over the last few years? I can’t. I could go on and on about the history of blogging, how I’ve used it over the years, and where it is now that I find really surprising – but instead I just wanted to take a moment or two to let you know what I thought of upgrading to Wordpress 2.5.
Upgrading
As with all Wordpress upgrades, it is as easy as advertised. I was able to click Upgrade and in a matter of milliseconds my database was updated. Since I hadn’t upgraded since prior to 2.2 I had a few plugins that were now rendered obsolete, so I deactivated them, edited only a few template tags, and deleted a few template files – and I was done.
Quick tips for upgrading, that may save your life one day, are as follows:
- Back up your blog’s database
- Deactivate all plugins
Doing these two, rather simple, things will save you tons of time and the need to debug thousands of lines of code once you’ve upgraded and you see some errors from your plugins.
A few oddities
There are a few things I’ve noticed that seem sorta odd – but I think I have to do a little more investigating to be sure. The first is that I can no longer reorganize the “write panel” in the Wordpress admin? Maybe there is a plugin or option somewhere to let me do this, but I’d much rather be able to reorder this page how I’d like it. Like, why is Slug all the way at the bottom?
The second thing is that, in my opinion, Wordpress should have told me that I no longer need the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, and that I could just go to Manage > Import and quickly convert my tags into Wordpress tags and be done. The process was really simple and I was able to disable a huge plugin, which I like, but even knowing that it was available wasn’t apparent enough.
I used to have two mobile categories here on my site, one for mobile photos and one for mobile notes. Each of them resided under a parent Mobile category. The URLs for these were /mobile/notes/ and /mobile/photos/. I can no longer structure my categories like this because Wordpress 2.5, automatically, decided to rename my category slugs to photos-2 and notes-2. Very annoying. Is this a bug?
I don’t have “Add media”
The Wordpress Admin needed a change and, while I’m not in love with the new design quite yet, any change was a good change and I’m sure that future version (and time) will go a long way.
Oh. I don’t have a “media panel” for uploading multiple photos/video, etc. Where is that?
Conclusion
Solid update and I recommend it for everyone that uses Wordpress for no other reason than the inline plugin updating – which is something that Wordpress should use to upgrade its own code base too!
Now I really need to get the new theme of my site completed so that I can take advantage of all of these new things I’ve been plugging in.
10 Comments
Colin,
Thanks for the update on WP 2.5 upgrade. I like the two reminders, backup and unplug
.
Did you have any other trouble (since coming from 2.2) with the Category/Tag changes? I didn’t realise it was as easy as importing. An old blog i recently brought across had a bunch of tags that I just left behind because of Tag Warrior not being available. Should have looked deeper.
Stu: Just click Manage > Import > Ultimate Tag Warrior. It does the rest. Then I deleted my “tag.php” and “tags.php”. Then, I changed my template tags. I followed this information.
Re the slug, you can change it from _directly_ under the title of the post.
Justin Blanton: “Change”? Meaning after it is already saved? I saw Mullenweg’s demo and his sorta did it asynchronously, mine doesn’t. So I have more investigating to do.
Yeah, you can modify it there immediately after you take the focus away from the title box.
Colin: Thanks for the heads up, much appreciated.
Hah, thanks for this post. I just upgraded from WP 2.0.ancient to 2.5 (complete with the old “forgot to disable plugins first” oopsie) and groaned at the thought of manually migrating my tags from UTW, but thanks to Google I found this post.
Johan Svensson: Thanks! Oh, and thanks Google!
Hey Colin, I am having the same issue with my upgrade in that my ‘Add Media’ panel is absent. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me what it was and then I thought to deactivate plugins to see if any was the culprit.
Well, it turns out that it is my Viddler Video Companion plugin that causes it to disappear. I turned it on/off a few times and it is definitely causing it. Any ideas why?
Andrew: Yep. You’ve nailed it. I have a new version, 1.1, coming out as soon as I can finish it up!