Wordpress 2.5 upgrade
Apr
2008
Well; I’ve taken the plunge and updated to Wordpress 2.5, and it was a beautiful experience.
It was quite smooth; disable plugins- check. Backup Database- check. Backup files- check. Wipe everything but my config.php, and plugins/itemstats/themes directories- check. Install the new files- check. Run the database upgrade- check.
It’s running beautifully, and most of my plugins are working fine. I had to replace a couple with updated competitors, but I’m quite liking it all. As an example, I’ve gone from an automatic database backup utility to a database utility with automatic backups, optimizations, and more… very nice!
The new backend is a beautiful thing; they’ve collapsed a lot of the options into nice, succinct tabs, with sub-options.
Looking at everything, I think the best way to do what I want with this post (Review 2.5/promote my favorite plugins) is to just go down my tab/option list… SO- With my plugins that create their own tabs, I have the following tabs/suboptions (I’ll give detail for the not-so-obvious ones)
- Write
- Posts
- Pages
- Links- it’s nice to see this in the write section, instead of being a several-click task in the Manage Links section as before.
- Manage
- Posts
- Pages
- Links
- Categories
- Tags
- Link Categories
- Media Library- a new one to me; apparently WP2.5 is including a built-in media library.\
- Import
- Export
- Subscriptions
- TinyMCE Advanced (Allows me to add/edit buttons on my TinyMCE interface with a drag and drop interface.)
- Ad Units (From Adsense Manager; allows me to manage/define ads from various services and have them display where I want, on whichever pages I want. Very nice ad management interface.
- Design
- Themes
- Widgets
- Theme Editor
- AWP Management (Ajaxed Wordpress; the plugin that allows the inline post loading/commenting.)
- Comments - finally got it’s own tab; makes a lot of sense.
- Comments- similar to the old Manage Comments page.
- Akismet Spam
- cformsII - my Contact Forms plugin. Very powerful, quite nice… not exactly user-friendly, though, if you don’t like doing a little bit of minor code here and there.
- Database- my Wp-DBManager plugin
- Database- all the info you ever wanted and then some about your database.
- Backup Database- Create a backup, gzipped or no.
- Manage Backup DB- Download, restore, delete, or e-mail a database backup. What’s nice about this tool is that it maintains backups indefinately, so you can have snapshots of your DB from creation/installation of this plugin onward.
- Optimize DB- Mmmm… nice!
- Repair DB- Very nice; I hope I never have to use this one!
- Empty/Drop tables- Hoo… that’s a bit extreme, and I’m kind of shocked that that option is in here, but hey…
- Run SQL Query- yeah; like I said, a rather powerful plugin.
- DB Options
- Uninstall.
- Gallery- my NexGen Gallery plugin.
- Gallery- it’s got it’s own landing page, with plugin news.
- Add gallery
- Manage Gallery
- Album- combine galleries into albums or slideshows, etc.
- Options- Paths, thumbnail settings, watermarks, and more.
- Style- modify the gallery CSS
- Setup- reset all options, uninstall, etc.
- Roles- what user roles have access to what options.
- About
- Settings
- General
- Writing
- Reading
- Discussion
- Privacy
- Permalinks
- Miscellaneous
- All in One SEO- Search Engine Optimization
- AA Google 404- Ask Apache Google -enabled 404 error pages.
- FeedBurner
- Google Analytics
- Configure Postie- Significantly enhanced posting options.
- Subscribe to Comments
- WP Super Cache- I don’t have it enabled normally, but it uses both the normal HTML caching method, and a DB-to-HTML caching method that it claims makes you digg-proof on a shared host… if I ever get a digg, I guess I’ll test that…
- Yadis- Use your WP Domain as an OpenID host by redirecting openid requests to an openID provider’s server.
- AdSense Manager
- XML-Sitemap- Creates an XML sitemap that allows better SEO.
- Plugins
- Users
Hoo; that was quite a bit more than I planned on posting…
