Oh, yeah…
I keep meaning to mention this, but I’ve recently upgraded my blogs to the latest version of WordPress. Now, no one has probably noticed that, but I thought it was noteworthy. Well, if I did the upgrade right, no one noticed. Certainly, no one said anything if they did notice.
Mostly, it was a Very Good Thing to have upgraded, but there are some differences that still throw me off a bit. First, there’s the whole new interface deal. It used to be that I had to deal with a pretty simple, text-only interface. Now, though, the whole thing has gone all WYSIWYG and it’s totally throwing me off. Especially because it edits HTML natively. I’m getting used to it, but, still, I have to remember little details like not just hitting “enter” when I want a new line instead of a whole new section/paragraph. Secondly, the tools have really been improved. Linking and formating and everything else have been upgraded to match that slick new WYSIWYG interface, but they’ve added some HTML tools that they didn’t have before. Or, if they had them, didn’t showcase very well. Also improved is the preview section. Now, instead of just showing me a preview of the code in the post itself, WordPress previews the post as it would appear on the blog, with headers and footers and everything.
The one thing, so far, that I don’t like is the way the new version updates the timestamp on the post. For the most part, it doesn’t. Once you save a post as a draft, it takes a timestamp and seems to hold that until you manually change it. Other than that, though, I really adore the new version.
So, now you know. Doesn’t that make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside?
Anyway, one of the reasons for the upgrade was because I was developing plugins for WordPress. You can get to one of them right from this blog. Moonie, the name of the plugin, is a little dodad that let’s you add the neat moonphase stuff to your WordPress blog. Now, after admiring it on my blog, you can have it for yourself. Enjoy!
A man after my own heart… always tinkering with WordPress. I’m fairly new to the process and not, by any stretch of the imagination, an IT professional. But I do steal a paycheck (indirectly) from the Evil Empire, and I get to do it remotely. So, how painful was the upgrade? Because of my indecisiveness, I’m always faced with de-bugging the three (or more) themes I use for CSS, RSS, XML and browser compaitibility.
Comment by Middle-aged White Guy — 6/6/2006 @ 12:17 pm
Well, it depends on what you’re upgrading from. The upgrade from WP 1.5 to 2 was simple. I did a backup, turned off my plugins, copied the files and ran the upgrade script. No problem. When I first upgraded from MoveableType to WP, it was a little more complicated than that.
The only thing I had some issues with going from 1.5 to 2 was all the customization I had done to my templates. So, I converted the old “themes” to the modern way of doing it. Which, to be honest, was mainly just moving some data from one template file to another and fixing some older code to match the new specification.
So, in short, not too bad at all. Converting the plugins from MT to WP was a chore, but there was almost no difference from WP 1.5 to 2. And, let me emphasize, I am NOT a programmer. I herd servers and workstations for a living. Coding is a bit of recreation for me. 😉
Comment by the Network Geek — 6/6/2006 @ 1:15 pm