WordPress 1.2 is ALMOST here…
WordPress is ALMOST ready to release version 1.2. Yesterday they released 1.2 Release Candidate 2, which is expected to be nearly identical to the final release.
So far, it’s been great. Most of what you see hasn’t changed… the administration side of it has been revamped, however. Several things are more intuitive. Subcategories have been implemented, though I have yet to test them. (Note to self: Test them.) The blog-by-email function almost works, though I’ll have to give it time. It didn’t function with 1.0.2, which was previously installed.
The upgrade process was ultimately painless, with one major gripe and one minor one. The major gripe: Somehow, all comments with quotes and apostrophes in them got hosed — there is now a slash preceding them. I haven’t figured out yet what went wrong there. You’re not seeing the issue because I enabled the “Textile” plugin that came with the new version of WP. It has cleared up the problem for now, though I really don’t want it enabled. Research time…
The minor one, which Les over at SEB discovered as well: Most customizations to the main index template will be lost… meaning any time you do something to the template, you need to keep track… cause you’ll be doing it again. :/ My experience wasn’t as harrowing as Les’s… I lost all of three links I had manually placed in the “Meta” column to the right of your screen. Les has several entries in a row about his tests of wordpress. Check the front page of the site once you’re done reading the one I linked. [Side note: Les has decided to go with ExpressionEngine, when I thought sure he'd end up using Drupal.] This experince is a good indicator that I shouldn’t be tweaking the template too much right now, when time’s a more valuable commodity to me.
Um, index.php is backwards compatible all the way to 1.0, so you can use the exact same file you used before with 1.2.
Matt, the upgrade instructions specifically said I should upload the index.php and I did without thinking about it.
Honestly, I’m not saying that WP is bad, but I don’t relish the idea of having to re-do the index.php every time I upgrade WordPress for six blogs so I’ve decided to use ExpressionEngine where I can upgrade without worrying about losing my template in the process.
Now, I may still end up using Drupal for SEB, but for the rest of the sites I host it’ll be ExpressionEngine.
Matt: Thanks for that tidbit, I’ll keep it in mind for the next upgrade. However, nothing I read made that clear. I am usually not one to tinker with page templates too much (I’ll tinker more with the CSS, if anything) and have already got a work-around for my link-loss.
…and by the way, thanks for all the work you put into WordPress.
Ben, I must say I am so impressed with everything you’ve done here. Great work. I just did a first install of 1.2 on a different domain name and I’m still trying to figure out how to get the index.php file to be in the top level dir instead of the wordpress dir. Of course, it could have something to do with the fact that it’s 2:20 in the morning.