Wait on Your WordPress Upgrade
We love WordPress. Totally. And really believe in the structure and benefits of Open Source programming. But like any complex undertaking, WordPress upgrades usually need some tweaking, even after hundreds (thousands?) of beta testers have run through a version. Beta Testers are usually advanced users who really know what they’re doing and have the time, ability, and desire to play around with software, looking for problems and suggesting ways to fix them. The upside is that they usually know more about how to do this than the regular user. The downside is that the regular user has neither the time nor patience nor ability nor resources to recover from glitches that power users automatically avoid by using the very best procedures (which regular users generally don’t even know exist), and power users are able to quickly diagnose and recover from pitfalls, should they not have seen them coming.
And come they do.
Glitches occur with almost every WordPress upgrade. They’re par for the course. And for the average user, they’re easy to avoid.
Just don’t do any 2.x upgrades. Wait until they come out with 2.x.1, at least. Why? Because for the past 3 years, there have been major glitches with every major upgrade and people are having major problems with updating to WordPress 2.8.
When you pop open your WordPress dashboard, and on every other “behind the curtains” page, there is a message from WordPress daying “WordPress 2.8 is available! Please update now.” Sometimes they even say that it is an urgent security issue. But a word to the wise: Unless you have your own tech guru or are one, wait until version 2.8.1 to update. People have not only had problems with the blog or site they’ve updated to 2.8, lots of people have actually lost their other sites on the same domain and subdomains!!! That’s a lot of recovery work, and it’s not worth it.
Here is a list of some of the problems 2.8 is fessing up to at this point, and from what we’ve seen in the WordPress forums and on other blogs, there are many others:
- Certain themes were calling get_categories() in such a way that it would fail in 2.8. 2.8.1 works around this so these themes won’t have to change.
- Dashboard memory usage is reduced. Some people were running out of memory when loading the dashboard, resulting in an incomplete page.
- The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
- A problem where the rich text editor wasn’t being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.
- Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.
If you are doing a from-scratch new fresh install, starting with 2.8 is great. It’s working beautifully and has excellent new features. We’re sure that 2.8.1 will have the major issues straightened out and that things will then be hunky dory. Often, 2.x.2 is even better, but over all, WordPress is still a fabulous invention and a major time-saver. It’s unfortunate that it’s best not to be an early adopter with the 2.8 update, but you’ll feel much better and save a lot of time and hair.
