I upgraded my WordPress installation from 2.0.x to 2.1.x tonight, and I’m a little grumpy. Autosave is great and all, but does upgrading WordPress have to be so much of a hassle? The official way to upgrade is to unpack the latest zip over top of your current installation, which seems like a recipe for cruft to keep accumulating. Things like WP-Cache can get really confused in the middle of an upgrade, and then you’re stuck doing surgery. If a plugin like Akismet gets upgraded, then you end up picking and choosing which files to keep from your wp-content directory. Categories are no longer sorted alphabetically where I can quickly find a category, and I get a new bonus category called “Blogroll” which I’m sure cleans something up from a design standpoint but sits unwelcome among more logical category names. I upload images outside of WordPress, so the upload manager doesn’t matter much for me. I use the code view, so the changes in the visual editor don’t mean much either. Geez, I feel like the curmudgeon who had to walk 10 miles uphill in the snow to install WordPress.
My biggest surprise was a small thing: the older version of WordPress had really nice “preview ?” and “edit ?” links so that as you’re writing a post, you can jump back and forth easily between the edit textarea and the preview iframe. The newer version of WordPress removes those handy links. Grrr!
Now it’s great that WordPress is open source so that I can go back to (say) the 2.0.7 release from the release archives and find/add



or

back into the files, but it’s a bummer to have to go mucking around to do this. What’s the difference between edit-form-advanced.php or edit-page-form.php and why do I have to add code in two places? Bah.
Firefox 2 already gives me solid autosave and spellcheck functionality, so losing the edit/preview links means that I was actually less happy with WordPress after the upgrade. Anyway, let me know if you see anything weird.


Upgrading WordPress - Read More...