I’m knee deep in the world of WordPress right now. I actually oversee five setups, and when there is a new release of an upgrade, that’s five sites I have to work through. Backup here, backup there, overwrite the old, and in with the new. It’s a few hour process when all is said and done.
The big thing right now is that 2.0.7 was released just a few days ago. In fact, 2.0.6 was released not even two weeks ago, and I’d avoid that version if I were you. There was some security concerns in the PHP, meaning that could allow some hacking to happen to your blog. Not good.
The hugely geeky reason that I know this is that I have recently joined up with the development mailing list. Just a couple of days after the 2.0.6 release, there was an announcement on the list about the issue and a test version sent out to all subscribers for testing. This is why I always hesitate to be on that “bleeding edge” of things. It’s good to let people much smarter than you test things out if you don’t have the resources to do it yourself.
The WordPress Podcast is what really got me into the idea of joining the testers mailing list. WordPress 2.1 is in beta, and I get a kick out of seeing the exchange of knowledge about what’s new, what doesn’t work, and so on. You can get more info about it at WordPress Planet.
I did a local install of it and made a preliminary look through of the next generation of WordPress. There’s some interesting things, but it’s still too early for me to report on it. Regardless, I’m looking forward to the full release, as many folks have for over the past year.
The WP Podcast did just mention that there is talk about a 120-day turnaround between versions 2.1 and 2.2, a vast departure of the development, or lack there of, that we’ve seen from the WordPress folks. This won’t stop me from doing development from here on out in 2.1. Who knows when it will go into full release.
Wrote this post while waiting for the last of the sites to finish updating and listening to the They Might Be Giants podcast. Holy crap. Now back to your regularly scheduled geekiness.
Update: This post about 10 things you should know about WordPress 2.1 is a really great read about the new version that should be coming out soon. In fact, this article sites as January 22, 2007 being the day that this version is to be fully released.
You wanna do mine too? I’ll give ya a quarter!
Make it two quarters and you might be onto something. :p
You’re on TypePad though. I’d make you a switcher. I’m good at that, ask Rebecca.
Hi John,
I’m on WordPress as well, as you may have noticed. Is the upgrade as scary as the instructions looked for one a while back? (There were all kinds of backups and turning of this thing off and that thing on…
I also have a few (not many) plugins that I worry wouldn’t make the jump with me – audio player and Akismet (although I suspect the latter is probably OK, since it ships with the original package)
Or should I just wait for 2.1 where there are clearly new features?
To me, it’s always good to make the upgrades as they come out for WordPress. Don’t know if you caught this a while back, but my blog was hacked because I didn’t make an upgrade. I haven’t seen a version of WP come out that didn’t include some sort of security update.
The process can be a little intimidating, but I can sum it up in a few easy steps. Use the WP backup plugin to back up your blog, download a copy of your theme off your FTP server, and then copy all the WP files to your site EXCEPT for the “wp-contents” folder. Then hit that update URL that is specified. The whole turning plugins off before hand is totally needed at WP.org recommends. However, turn them off and back on after an upgrade, one by one. Even if the plugin is compatible with the new version, I’ve run into plugins that need to be kind of rebooted to make them play nicely.
Hope that helps.
Thanks for the link and thanks for the testing work you do!