Altitis

So I’ve jumped onto the 2.5RC1 bandwagon with both feet to see what the future brings.

The upgrade was extremely easy and fast - in fact, I spent a lot more time setting up my sandbox environment to match the live Altitis but with all the necessary privacy options and its own database than doing the upgrade proper.

I didn’t experience any particular roadblocks in the process. Of course, to take no chances, here are a couple of preparations you need to make:

• Deactivate all plugins
• Revert to the Default theme
• Go into the widget section and copy all the code I have in inactive text widgets to somewhere else (OK, I actually skipped this as I still have all the code in my live blog). Note that the upgrade will NOT conserve the content of inactive text or RSS widgets
• Make sure your wp-config.php is backed up (BTW, if you build on a sandbox, double-check that it isn’t pointing on your live database)
• Copy the files
• Log on, you will get prompted to upgrade the DB
• ???
• Profit

That’s it. Upgrading the DB took about 3 seconds for 244 posts and over 100000 words written (I passed that benchmark two posts ago BTW).

After upgrading, I first switched to my custom theme and looked whether everything was working, then reactivated plugins one by one.

The basics are working without problems. The new Dashboard and the Write interface take a bit getting used to in order to find your way around, but everything is still around somewhere. One small quirk: plugins which tie directly into the write interface may have colour scheme issues, like the All-in-One SEO Plugin - the title of the plugin’s block on the write interface is white on a light blue background now. That’s no biggie though since changing the admin colour scheme is, apparently, very simple.

In terms of performance, 2.5 is a lot faster - in fact, loading a page takes about the same time in 2.5 than with a 2.3.3 page cached with the wp-cache plugin (which I have therefore not reactivated).

I tried out the automatic plugin upgrade function (after manually deactivating the plugin) on WP-Stats, and it went through without issues. Be cautious about the automatic upgrade, though, as it currently has issues with plugins having complex installation procedures (eg having to modify code) or database components. If for some reason a plugin borks your installation, remember that simply connecting to your plugin directory through FTP and renaming the offending plugins’ folder will brute-force deactivate it (since WP no longer can find it).

The new Widget management interface doesn’t work properly in IE7, but I didn’t get any problems in Firefox.

The new image settings in the post interface now provides basic sizing and positioning options by default. The image upload feature, which is AJAX-based, while being an improvement in terms of functionality, brings a major drawback for people who blog from work during their lunch breaks. The AJAX upload may run afoul corporate firewall and proxy rules, which will not just prevent your upload from actually working, but most probably put your Firefox into perpetual hanging mode. This particular change gets a big no-no from me in practical terms.

A couple of plugins have functionalities not working properly in 2.5 RC1, notably Simple Tags v1.3.9.1 which had an option to suggest tags based on your posts’ content in the write interface - that part is currently not working (although the block is still around).

Summary

I found WordPress 2.5 RC1 upgrade to be, all in all, a painless matter, and only a couple of relatively minor quirks have happened.

What I like:

• The new Dashboard and administration is clearer once you get used to it
• The performance improvements are notable when you compare it to a non-cached 2.3.3 installation
• The new widget management screen

What I don’t like:

• The new Upload feature which doesn’t work through my corporate firewalls, and that’s a BIG no-no.

Plugins which do not work fully for me(or at all):

• BackUpWordPress v0.4.5
• Simple Tags v1.3.9.1

Plugins I haven’t reactivated so far:

• WP-Cache
• Hot Linked Image Cacher
• TinyMCE Advanced
• Search Regex

Plugins which appear to work:

• Akismet
• All-In-One-SEO Pack
• Blog Metrics
• Broken Link Checker
• Feedburner Feedsmith
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Mini Meta Widget
• Robots Meta
• Wordpress.com Stats
• Statpress
• WP Youtube

All of these in their latest version at the time of this writing. Note that some of these suffer from the change of layout in the Dashboard, in particular the XML Sitemaps plugin, which loses its right sidebar menu, having everything piled ontop of the manage screen.

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