Bidin’ My Time on the WordPress Ella Upgrade
I’ve spent some time today reading various comments about the new WordPress upgrade to Version 2.10.
This blog, as part of the b5media network, runs on the WordPress platform so upgrading for this blog is not something I’m personally responsible for. However, I have a couple of other blogs which also use WordPress and some people I’m coaching are also on WordPress. So today I’ve been doing some research to try and assess what I need to know and/or do about the upgrade, whether right now or in the future. I hope this post may be of some help to others trying to answer similar questions.
The official announcement last week by WordPress.org informed us that the 2.1 upgrade is named Ella, in tribute to the great singer Ella Fitzgerald. I wonder whether they thought of an Ella song as a theme? ”Can Anyone Explain?” perhaps? I’m sure they weren’t thinking of “You Won’t Be Satisfied”. Maybe “My Happiness”? “Our Love is Here to Stay?”
The announcement highlighted seventeen features of the new version, from Autosave (which could help ensure, for example, that a computer malfunction or power surge doesn’t mean you lose a post half way through composing) to bundling of a new version of the Akismet comment spam catching plugin.
Good as these and other new features or enhancements may be, the one that really appeals to me is the sixth in the list:
You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
That one feature is going to provide some welcome options for business owners and executives who have a need for a more traditional “web page” as well as wanting the blog functionality.
To install the upgrade, there is the official WordPress guide How to Upgrade in Five Steps. And for anyone whose web hosting service provides Fantastico, there can be an option to manage the process more swiftly. However, I’ve just checked the service where I have a couple of other WordPress blogs and while I saw that Fantastico was configured to handle the WordPress 2.10 upgrade, I also noticed the following warning:
Click on Upgrade only if
- no files, languages, themes have been modified
- you haven’t added mods to this installation of WordPress
Hmmm. So it’s not just a mouseclick or three away. Or it might be, but with a lot fixing up later, it would seem.
For anyone contemplating the upgrade or just wanting more information, my b5media colleague Aaron Brazell has a detailed and - for me anyway - very helpful post, 10 things you should know about WordPress 2.1, with an extended comments discussion. But while I could see from Aaron’s post that it would be feasible even for my non-technical brain to work through the process with reasonable confidence, there were a few items which indicated that it could be in practice a slower process than I would like.
For example, on MySQL:
It should be noted that although most hosting providers have upgraded their MySQL version to 4.0+, many are still lingering at MySQL 3.23. WordPress 2.1 eliminates support for this older version of MySQL.
Well, I’ve just checked on my own sites as mentioned above and can’t figure out from the control panel which version of MySQL is installed. Yes, I could email support and would have an answer reasonably soon, but for me it’s one more reason not to rush into the upgrade. That, and the discussion going on, as for example in the comments attached to Aaron’s post, about 2.1 and its compatibility or otherwise with various plugins, have convinced me that just now I don’t have a compelling enough reason, let alone uncommitted time, to go through all the business of the upgrade.
Luve-Me.net says:
Basically, if you don’t care about the 550+ bug fixes and other new things, you’re best to just stick with 2.07 until some more changes are made.
Which is what I’ll be doing.
Tags: Ella, Ella-Fitzgerald, Fantastico, technosailor, upgrade, WordPressRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Blogging Platforms, General, Resources, Reviews
4 opinions for Bidin’ My Time on the WordPress Ella Upgrade
jldtudor
Feb 1, 2007 at 9:40 pm
Thanks for the post. I would like to upgrade, but am a bit fearful of messing it up (although I believe that I have enough technical expertise to repair it), I just don’t feel like messing it up.
I have installed WP 2.1 for a friend. Although I haven’t tested every feature, I like what I see so far.
I’m also testing a WP plugin for the Joomla CMS. There are a few bugs that I need to work out of it before I put it into production.
Did you upgrade from 2.0.6 to 2.0.7, or did you start out using 2.0.7?
jldtudor
Des Walsh
Feb 1, 2007 at 10:31 pm
As this is a b5media network site I don’t actually handle the upgrade issue. I have done WP upgrades before, but this one seems to have a few potential traps. My recollection is that previous upgrades involved only a couple of keystrokes, but I might be imagining that. Robert Kingston has a very positive post about upgrading and the post includes an invitation to email him if you have questions: http://www.smallbusinessbranding.com/659/upgrade-wordpress21/
jldtudor
Feb 1, 2007 at 10:43 pm
Des, thanks for the response. I’ll take a look at Robert’s post.
jldtudor
jldtudor
Feb 24, 2007 at 11:07 am
Hello Des,
Just thought I’d let you know that I finally took the plunge and upgraded my WordPress blog, so far so good.
I wouldn’t recommend it for the faint of heart though, because you have to delete files. Just read the comments on my post.
Overall, I think I benefited from the new features in Ella release. I could not export my content from the 2.0.6 version, but I can in the Ella release. That came in handy when I moved my blog to a host provider. I just imported the xml file that Ella creates when you do an export and my content as well as all of their respective comments were successfully imported. The only thing that I didn’t like was the fact that the import process creates new page id numbers for each post.
Thanks for your post. If you have any question please leave me a comment or send me an email and I reply.
Jose
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