wordpress 2.0 review for non-professional bloggers

It’s that time again!

Yes, a new version of WordPress is out, and so nathaniel has to put his 2 cents in.

First question: should i upgrade?

Well, that depends.

Truth is that most of the changes have happened on the back end – stuff “under the hood” so to speak, so that the blog itself, for the most part, won’t look very different. There’s a new interface that works pretty much the same way (tho a lot prettier), but a few nice add-ins. For example, you can now have WYSIWYG / rich editing, like blogger. You can preview in the actual page, as a frame, and you can add new categories on the fly, while posting. The database backup plug-in is pre-installed (tho I don’t see how to re-import it afterwards!), and most useful for group blogs, there are different “roles” for different users with varying privileges – pre-made, or make your own.

More on asymptomatic’s full new feature list, including thumbnails of themes, amongst a few others. There are a couple of minor bugs still, so take a look at this list if you are bit scared. Generally, if you find one or two that piss you off while working, you can find a workaround at that link. I only found one that did as such, and it took 5 mins to fix.

The big thing, and Owen Winkler (aka ringmaster) from the above-linked blog mentions this, is that a lot of the functions bases have changed – been simplified, modularized or moved to places where they make more sense. On the one hand, this makes things much more interesting for potential new plug-ins bound to come out in the next few months. On the other hand, if you have a few plug-ins you’ve come to rely on a bit (such as wp-email and spell-check, in my case), make sure they will work by cross-referencing it against this list.

Themes should still work just fine, tho check back to where you got them from soon, to see if they now come with thumbnails (all my themes, including the new artsemerging theme – update 30 august 2007, now widget compatible!, are 2.0 ready, with images).

All in all, my advice is that unless you are starting a brand new site, or are sure your plugins work or are ok without them for a bit, wait on the upgrade. The bugs are easy enough to deal with, and we should have a minor fix in the next few weeks, but I think you’ll want some catch-up, non-Christmas time to let plug-in makers and editors get their code functioning properly with the new base. One of two things will definitely happen by mid-February: either you will see a new plugin that makes it worth the upgrade, or all the plug-ins you already use will be ready to go…. I’m giving spell-check and wp-email till mid-jan, then I can’t wait anymore :)