As much as I adore WordPress, one thing does drive me nuts – the constant updates. I’d love to see a stable version last long enough for me to get truly comfortable with it before they change things again. I was almost getting comfortable with WordPress 2.5, and now they’ve released 2.6.
At the same time, I can’t complain. I’m actually glad to see certain features added, including two that I’d been wishing for for a while now:
- The ability to change the order of my uploaded images (I hate scrolling through pages looking for one I uploaded months ago, but that I still use regularly).
- The ability to add image captions (I’ve been wanting an easy way to do this when adding images for ages, so I’m thrilled it’s available now).
There are quite a few other features that I’m looking forward to playing with. You can get a feel for them in this video walkthrough, or find additional feature changes listed below:
Additional Changes
- You can now revert back to old saved versions of posts. Did you make changes to your post only to realize later that you liked the original better? Well, now it’s not lost for good! WordPress 2.6 even tracks your edits, and lets you compare versions side-by-side. You can also see who saved each edit, which is ideal for multi-author blogs.
- The new Gears extension can speed up your blogging process by storing images and other files remotely on your hard drive.
- Theme previews now let you test a theme on your site before committing to it. That’s great, but I’d love to see this a step further – ideally, I’d like to be able to access the theme files for each uploaded theme without committing to it on the blog, so I can make my design edits and preview them before sending the theme live, rather than having a “work in progress” theme up when I’m dealing with color changes, ad placement, etc. for a new theme which needs to be tested on the site itself.
- You can now see the word count of your posts from your write post screen in the admin panel – nice new feature.
There are quite a few more changes, which you can read about on the WordPress Blog.
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Brie Wallace
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I had been putting off updating to 2.5, and I am glad I did because now it’s time to update again! Makes me wonder – if I wait another few months, will there be a 2.7? You’re right, it is hard to keep up!
It looks like it has some great new features — but I like to hold off to make sure all is good before messing with it. I just finally upgraded to 2.5.x and that was a nightmare. So backup, backup, backup first.
The only feature I’m interested in is the word count. Not that I necessarily need to know. It’s just a nice to have.
I may upgrade one of my blogs if I don’t have anything else to do one day, but I’m not in any rush. Like Katherine said, if I wait awhile, version 2.7 will probably be out.
I just upgraded one of my larger blogs today. It wasn’t too big of a problem (I always worry about ones where I’ve edited the theme a decent bit), although there was one significant issue:
My categories disappeared.
It wasn’t difficult to fix – I had to go into the MySQL database, find the wp-terms table and manually re-enter my categories. To do that though, you’ll need both the category name and slug from the old database (so BACKUP YOUR DATABASES FIRST). It took about 10 minutes of my life that I can’t get back, but other than that, the blog seems to be up and functioning on the front-end. I’ll be doing my first post since the upgrade later today, so we’ll see what happens on the admin side.
I’ll probably end up upgrading most of mine. I still have some in 2.1 and 2.2 versions, so it’s time I do it. I figure I may as well get them all on the same playing field (if for nothing else, to make life easier when I’m updating).
I think there’s still one I can’t upgrade, but I’m not sure – something to do with the plugins not being compatible.
What I’d really love to see as a default is the ability to order our links, categories, and pages without stupid plugins that keep becoming incompatible.
I just upgraded this blog to 2.6. It seems ok at the moment, but if you come across any glitches, do let me know.
Jennifer — I am using the 2.6 on two of my newest blogs, but I am still using older versions on my writing blog. I agree with you; the constant updating is annoying. If the updating was seamless, didn’t cause template problems etc, then I wouldn’t care. But it seems to be one of those things where you never know what’s going to break until it’s already done. Yours seems to have gone well in the upgrade.