Upgrading my WordPress

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Upgrading my WordPress

Earlier this week I was writing a post and lost it. Losing data, even a couple paragraphs, is the most annoying thing I can think of. So I looked into autosave on WordPress and discovered that up-to-the-second WordPress installations already support it.

I'd been meaning to upgrade my WordPress installation forever and just hadn't gotten around to it, so I upgraded this weekend-it's really nice! Let's see, what's good, what's bad. Let's start with the bad first, because there isn't much:

- It took a little bit of effort. When you've been blogging for a year and have tweaked most of your template files a little bit and are running a few plug-ins, it's good to be cautious. I hadn't been backing up my MySQL database or www directory, so I wanted to write some teensy scripts to do that. That took the majority of the time. It's a bit unwieldy to untar a directory on top of an old directory, or to copy over modified files to a new WordPress installation. There probably isn't an easy way to abstract out the file changes though.
- The "Categories" box only shows about 10 categories at once, and the box doesn't appear to be resizeable. Anyone know where to edit the code off the top of their head?
- The visual rich editor isn't my cup of tea. For example, it looks like the "insert a link" button requires that you select the text that you want to hyperlink. That's great, unless you're using the AutoCopy extension on Firefox, which automatically copies anything you select to the clipboard. Why? Because God intended selecting text to copy to the clipboard, that's why!

The net effect is that if you copy a url, selecting the text to hyperlink will erase the url that's on the clipboard. And the make-a-link button only seems to activate when you select text, so you get some very degenerate behavior. Luckily, each user can choose to use or not use the visual rich editor.
- The SecureImage captcha plugin doesn't work for WordPress 2.x, I think.

Okay, time for things I love.

- The documentation on the upgrade was great and complete, with no surprises. Major props for that. It's also editable, so I submitted a correction for what I thought was a typo.
- Autosave. Okay, it turns out that 2.0.4 doesn't include Autosave, but the next version probably will.
- Akismet. Nice job on the UI and the backend on this. I'm sure I'll delve into this more over time.
- Post previews are much better. You see what the page will actually look like.

- Lots of little things to streamline your life, like the "preview ?" button at the top-right of the "Write Post" page that takes you directly to the preview frame. And the " edit ?" button to take you back up to the text-area of the post. I'm falling in love all over again.
- "Save and Continue Editing" seems to work with Firefox. Was I the only guy in the world that would get a blank page if I hit this button twice on one post? It always bothered me, but was below the annoyance threshold to hunt down where the interaction of WordPress/web server/Firefox was happening. Maybe having referrers off caused it?
- The AJAX to move/expand/collapse stuff on the "Write Post" page is super spiff. Minimize the stuff that you don't change and expand the boxes that do change, plus put often-changing boxes toward the top of the page. Easy peasy, and very smart.
- User roles are interesting. I'm playing around with the notion of asking readers to register in order to comment.
- Posting doesn't wait for pings to succeed, so publishing a post feels much snappier.

All in all, a really nice piece of work. I dropped a small donation over to Automattic, and if nothing major blows up in the next few days, I'll drop some more in the donation box.

Let me know if you see any weirdness or problems. For that matter, let me know what your favorite WordPress plug-ins are.

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