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Don’t Be a WP 2.5 Hater
I have had issues with WordPress upgrades in the past. Nothing makes my day like going through the upgrade process, refreshing the page and getting a nice clean white screen. And then activating the plugins one at a time to find the culprit.
But with 2.5, I’ve had no issues yet. Of course, I’ve not upgraded on my two my main blogs yet. But the upgrade went through without a hitch on three other sites. I use the same set of plugins and only activate as needed on new sites. My plugin folder is about 12 MB in size. If something was going to screw up, I think it would have.
As far as using the interface goes, there is not much difference really that I can see. Different colors, different icons, things in different places. But for the most part, I knew where to find everything.
Getting back to plugins, there is one function I like in the new WordPress. You can update plugins by clicking on a link. But like I said, I have a lot of plugins. So I found one that will update all of your out of date plugins with one click.
I have been staring at the plugins that are out of date at my blog for a while. Some day. There’s a lot of them. Plugin central took care of this with only about 2 seconds of my time.
One of the issues I had with expanding the amount of blogs I have was that I knew I could never keep everything up to date. If ten plugins needed updating, they would need updating across all of my blogs. This could take some time.
Now, though I can go ahead with my plan of having one pristine, perfect installation of WordPress that I will use to build all the new blogs. And while originally I was going to have one pristine folder of plugins that I would use to overwrite the old folder on updates, I can now just login and click a button.
Now I just have to install 2.5 here. I have heard issues with the Automatic Upgrade plugin and 2.5. With the other blogs, I used Dreamhost’s oneclick to upgrade. With the two on my server, I didn’t have the foresight to use Fantastico to install WordPress. So we shall see.
11 Responses to Don’t Be a WP 2.5 Hater
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Stephan, this is starting to become funny now, all the coincidences… I did not really look forwards to having to update a lot of my work, but I have finally been updating a bunch of my blogs yesterday to 2.5 and gotta say I am pretty pretty happy that I did. The update function for plugins is really great, a bigtimesaver in the future I am sure!
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Stephan, I just discovered your blog and read a bit. Just thought I’d leave you a comment saying how much I like it. You seem to make a really decent income from working part-time online, which is great, you have a lot of experience with affiliates and also programming and MMO in general. I also noticed you had the commentluv plugin (something I always wanted to install as well), and finally today I downloaded it from your link. Anyways, I’m off to subscribe to your RSS, and make sure I’ll come back. It’s always nice to read from somebody with this much experience and that’s actually making money online.
All the best
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Mirjam,
I was one of the hater’s for a while. Refused to do the updgrade. I am happy I did now though.
Anca,
Thanks for subscribing. The income is decent and I am hoping to make it better. We shall see.
Hi Stephan,
I received your email with that great heading! I was becoming one of those haters. I had plugins causing heaps of problems. One in particular was the visual editor, it wouldn’t work with one of my plugins.
Thank you for the plugin central link! I have been cringing at the thought of upgrading all my plugins too.
One more question…I do use the auto upgrade plugin for wp, is this a good thing do you think? I have always valued your opinion, and have been going to ask you. You mentioned there were issues, just curious as to whether I should use for all my other blogs. I have been reluctant to upgrade all my blogs because of problems I have been experiencing.
You have helped me out many times in the past, I guess this is going to be another one of those times!
Thanks again
PS I used the CommentLuv plugin for a while, but that one caused me a few problems too, so I had to disable it. Any ideas?
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Thanks! You just got me off my ass. I approved your comment and updated this blog to 2.5. It turns out I did use Fantastico so it went smooth. The only thing that happened was that it logged me out of the admin. Not even a database upgrade which was strange. My other installations required it.
I know the CommentLuv issue. Or of at least one. It bloats the database. Mine got to the point the backups weren’t coming through. As soon as I took all the excess feeds out of the database, the backups started coming via email again. I found a fix here: http://www.scratch99.com/2008/04/problems-with-commentluv-wordpress-plugin/
The thing is I think the fix reset the amount of items in my feed to 0 when it used to be 10. And I went a couple of days with no feed. And even after I set it to 10 again it took 10 posts to get ten items back in my feed for some reason.
But there looks to be a new version coming: http://www.fiddyp.co.uk/the-archimedes-commentluv-principle/
He’s always thinking. It’s good to visit neighborhoods like that. Makes me feel at home.
Okay, I did have issue with the executable PHP widget. It wasn’t updated before I updated WordPress. Now it is, shows it’s activated but the widgets themselves won’t show.
Had to track down the code originally in the widget in the database to the wp_options table and search for “widget_execphp” in the name field.
The solution is this plugin:
http://bluesome.net/post/2005/08/18/50/#allow_widget
And the code for blogrolls changed:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_list_bookmarks
I had zero issues upgrading to 2.5 or 2.5.1 until yesterday. Out of the blue the media uploader started getting the HTTP Error that has been popping up all over the place. I installed the plugin to disable Flash and it’s back to normal.
I am loving the new version, but the little oddities are frustrating.
I hate when that happens. I have had weeks go by after I had changed something on a site to find an issue with the change. The admin changes are little pointless to me. Yes, maybe it is a better design choice, but with so many people using it, sometimes it’s better to go with the old standby just because that is what people are familiar with.
Well by this point we are at 2.6.2 but it doesn’t change the fact that when 2.5 came out, it broke everything. I had about 4 common plugins that simply didn’t work for a few weeks because of 2.5 while I didn’t see any real reason to switch over.
2.6.1 was the worse for me. Took out two blog’s plugins and now I am just holding back on any updates for a while until I have a whole day just to focus on that, just in case.