It was dropped in the middle of the holiday season when we’re all too merry and some of us actually spend a few days hours away from a computer, so you could be forgiven for not noticing the release of WordPress 2.0. It’s supposedly more of a back-end update, and a lot of work has been done ‘under the hood,’ or so we’re told. I’ve not had much of a play with it yet, mainly because the stern warnings in the upgrade thread on the support forums caused me some concern, making me believe that my templates and plugins would suddenly stop working. As someone who does a lot of modifications to his sites, I was taking note. So I backed everything up and tried on the local copies of my site to find that, actually, most of my sites worked perfectly well. Viewfinder needed a few tweaks, but most of the others seem to come through unscathed, and there’s some serious mods in some of those I can tell you.
Anyway, I’m writing this in the new and improved admin area. Not much to tell. A few things I’ve noticed so far:
- The dashboard has had a clean up, about time too, though it’s still too crowded for me, just the latest WP news from WP.org/WP.com and stuff about my blog would be fine.
- The writing area has had a nice overhaul, it now boasts:
- a WYSIWYG editor, which is nice
- a resizeable writing box, useful too
- Expandable boxes for many features/options, which means you’re not overwhelmed,
but means unhiding stuff all the time, I think I’ll try and figure how to keep some fully expanded all the timeaha, if you unhide boxes it remembers what you had open for future posts and you can reorder the boxes by dragging them higher or lower too! - You can now add categories that don’t exisit without heading to a different page
- Likewise you can upload things without leaving the Write Post screen
- There’s also a rather cracking post preview which lets you see the post in your template as it will appear, rather than just any old way
- Themes now get thumbnails for you to preview and see what you’re getting
- The formatting of the Users page has changed, for the better
- The permalinks options also has a new look, with some simpler standard options to choose from
- Lastly, an Import option seems to have been added (or I may simply have missed that before)
All in all, it’s quite a nice change, and should make things easier (I’m led to believe) for people producing plugins, not to mention for those us who write posts. Fingers crossed all my plugins still appear to be working, including my Book Reviews plugin.
The busy old bees over at WordPress have also launched WordPress.com officially now too, so congrats and thanks to them for all the hard work and effort. I get the feeling I’m going to be getting a few upgrade requests in the new year.
Oh, I’d also like to add that I didn’t bother with the approved upgrade method, I did:
- Backed up my files and database (no harm in being certain)
- Uploaded a clean copy of 2.0, overwriting existing files where necessary (except .htaccess and wp-config.php)
- Ran the upgrade script
- Voila (fix any bugs)
Easy as that.