WordPress 2.5 Arrives

After months of testing and teasing, WordPress 2.5 is finally available. It has changed dramatically.

Oh, What the Heck

Throwing caution to the wind, I blindly upgraded this site to 2.5. So far, no problems have cropped up. In fact, at the moment everything seems fine (of course, let me know if you discover otherwise).

A Simple WordPress Upgrade?

After the tedious upgrade to WordPress 2.3, I fully expected something to crash and burn, particularly since 2.5 is such a significant change. Thankfully, it was boring and quick. Clicked “Upgrade WordPress,” then “Continue,” and it was done.

So What’s New in WP 2.5?

The changes are covered exhaustively by the WordPress team and countless others, but these are the things that I noticed after playing around with it for a few minutes.

• The redesigned admin interface is different and much improved.
• The Media Gallery is a snazzy way to add images, music, videos, etc. That is, if you like doing it that way. I tend to shy away from these automated code-creator gizmos in favor of hand-coding things.
• The Dashboard looks great with its new design. The important stuff is arranged in a more intelligent, top down fashion.
• Smoother WYSIWYG editing is included, as far as I can tell. Normally I don’t use this much but it’s nice to see it improving.
• Full-screen editing is just a feature of the editor, but deserves an item of its own. It’s a nice touch, though I wish it was available in the plain HTML editor. Dark Room style editing, sans brick-a-brack, is great.
• Permalink display is handy. At the top of the post the permalink that will be created is displayed, and an inline editing feature is included. One bug, however, is that once you edit the permalink, you are stuck with a manually-edited permalink. I.e. if you subsequently think of a better post title, you will have to manually edit the permalink to reflect the new title.
• Tag entry is still a pain. There should be a list of existing tags from which to choose (by clicking on them, preferably).
• Category entry has taken a step backwards, in my opinion. To enter a new category, you have to click “+Add New Category,” enter the category name, then click another Add button (or hit Enter). Kind of picky but it’s one more fussy thing getting in the way.
• A Gallery of sorts is supported. Upload images, include a [ gallery ] tag, and your images will be linked… or something like that. I am feeling underwhelmed, but maybe that’s just me.

WordPress 2.5 Screenshots

If you’re curious, here are some screenshots of the new WP 2.5 Admin interface.

Overall Impressions of WordPress 2.5

Well, compared to version 2.3, this looks quite a bit better. Best thing since sliced bread? No, not so much. But, amusing diversion for a couple hours? Sure.

WordPress 2.3 has been released and has a lot of bug fixes and nice new features. Here is a list of some of the changes.

• Native tagging support – in addition to categories, tags are now natively supported by WordPress. Importers for Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins are included.
• Update Notifications – if an update for WordPress or a plugin is available, a message is displayed indicating.
• Canonical URLs – enforces no-www preference and attempts to redirect incomplete URLs or URLs to posts with changed slugs to the correct location.
• Pending Review – now a contributing writer can submit a post for review by an administrator or editor.
• More features in WYSIWYG Editing – additional features of TinyMCE have been exposed.
• Full Atom 1.0 Support – including the publishing protocol.
• Using newer jQuery 1.1.4 – the latest and greatest jQuery is version 1.2.1, but at least they’ve upgraded to a faster core. jQuery is a great Javascript library.
• New taxonomy system – post and link categories have been combined with tags.
• Ability to disable update notifications – in case you don’t want these notifications.
• Pluggable Importers – you should be able to write or use plugins to import from additional sources.
• 351 Bug fixes – which is nice

Will Your Plugins Work?

Be sure to check the Plugin Compatibility List to get an idea of whether your installed plugins will have trouble under WordPress 2.3.

Upgrade Preflight Compatibility Check

Be sure to install and run the WordPress Upgrade Preflight Check to look for compatibility issues before you upgrade to version 2.3.

Upgrade Preflight Check is a plugin that will attempt to check your other plugins and themes for problems that may cause errors when upgrading to WordPress 2.3. Run this before upgrading and it may save some headaches. It works in version 2.3 too and may be useful to help identify the cause of errors.

Problems Upgrading to WordPress 2.3

They say to turn off plugins before upgrading, but who can be bothered with that? Well, I should have (a) run the preflight check and (b) turned off plugins.

The upgrade went fine for the most part, but I did run encounter two situations that required some attention, recorded here in case someone else trips over them (i.e. was as careless as I).

A couple sites running UltimateTagWarrior crashed with the following error on all pages.

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare is_tag() (previously declared in …/wp-content/plugins/UltimateTagWarrior/ultimate-tag-warrior.php on line 110

The fix was simply to comment out the is_tag() function in the ultimate-tag-warrior.php file.

/*
function is_tag() {
	global $utw;
	return (count($utw->GetCurrentTagSet()) > 0);
}
*/

WordPress database error: [Table 'wp_....wp_terms' doesn't exist]

Typically, if you don’t upgrade your database immediately after performing an upgrade, your site is mostly okay until you hit the admin interface and upgrade the database. However, after upgrading to WordPress 2.3, visitors to your site may see the above error until you perform the database upgrade step.

Not a big deal, since you need to upgrade the database anyway, but it might be a good argument for doing the upgrade in an off hour.

A Nice Upgrade

All in all, WordPress 2.3 is a nice upgrade and sets the stage for WordPress 2.4, slated for December, 2007. Tagging is now native, though support is limited. The dashboard feeds are pluggable, the canonical URL handling adds some SEO benefits, update notifications will help you keep on top of things, and the other new features — not to mention the bug fixes — argue for (carefully) upgrading to the new system.