Upgrading to 2.5
That the community of users was starting to talk up 2.5, and noticing that this site was built on 2.1, the dreaded step was taken on Saturday. Traffic is low(er) at weekends, so the logic was that if everything broke, the usual suspects might not notice. Hah.
The upgrade itself went extremely smoothly. Lots of plugins are broken, or more accurately, have no compatible version. Askimet, the machine that catches the spam, stubbornly refused to upgrade, and the plugin used to manage the plugins doesn’t play well either. But those aren’t Wordpress’s fault, and I’m sure the developers will catch up pretty quickly.
New WP features include a Gallery, and widgets are all built in, including options to create drop-down menus, which is very cool, if you can’t (or can’t be bothered to) code it yourself. The backend pages have been remodelled and are a big improvement. The very important ‘Write’ pages are clear and easy to navigate, although I’ll miss having the meta functions like categories, templates and so on in a right hand column so they can be checked as the post is written.
Tagging is new (to this site), but is here to stay, and will gradually replace the unwieldy list of categories, which will be dramatically reduced to a magazine-style few - photographer, review (of gallery shows, books, pieces of work), life of, tutorials, distractions - no more than 10 in any case. Suggestions for those would be most welcome. Whether or not the whole catalogue of some 250 or so posts will be tagged is moot at this point.
So why does this site look so damnably horrid? Template changes. The current Whitespace by Brian Gardner, the same geek who made the previous iteration, needs a fair amount of tweaking, but it might just stay. What do you think? Looks rather a lot like the new WordPress pages.
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