WordPress 2.2 released on Tuesday. And we’ve upgraded.
After my experience with the 2.1 upgrade I was wary. First, the 2.1 upgrade didn’t seem to work at all. Then, the sidebar links broke, as did smileys. Finally, I rewrote some .php code in my sidebar, fixed the sidebar links, and all was right again with the world. The upgrade to 2.1 reminded me a great deal of an old truism of the early 80s–“DOS isn’t done ’til Lotus won’t run.” (If anything dates me, tis that.) Upgrades should be easy, they shouldn’t take days…
Fortunately, the 2.2 upgrade was generally painless.
One change I make with every upgrade is I add additional smileys and the code to enable them. That code moved from vars.php to functions.php, and it took some time to figure out where I needed to make the appropriate edits to enable the new smiley functions.
The only real hitch I’ve had is that the sidebar widgets worked, but I couldn’t alter them in Opera as it didn’t show anything on the appropriate page on the backend. A re-upload of the Javascript libraries fixed the problems, so all I can figure is that a file didn’t work the way it was supposed to due to a bad upload.
Honestly, I’m not sure what’s new in WordPress 2.2 or why I needed to upgrade. It’s the 2.3 upgrade I’m looking forward to–I’m curious how the tagging implementation will work.
We are upgraded, and we are good. :spock:
Thanks for blazing the trail so that I can feel comfortable doing my upgrade. 😆
That’s me, the early adopter. 😎
I didn’t even turn off my plug-ins this time. Just the widgets plug-in, as it’s built into the WordPress core now. (And, just to be safe, I deleted the widgets.php file from the plug-ins directory on my server.)
Other than the slight Javascript hitch–due more, I think, to trying to upload only the Jscript files that were new or different than a bad upload–2.2 was an easy upgrade.
I didn’t even turn off my plug-ins this time. Just the widgets plug-in, as it’s built into the WordPress core now.
That’s what’s new in 2.2. 😉
Tagging was originally slated to be in 2.2 as well, but the developers wanted more time to test it. Thanks to their new release schedule, though, it should be only 3-4 months before 2.3 arrives.
In the core of 2.2, sure, that’s what’s new. But it’s not really new in the sense that Widgets were already there–you just had to install a plug-in to enable them.
I was a late adopter to Widgets. I didn’t see a lot of point to them–wasn’t coding my sidebar by hand easy enough? You sacrifice a certain amount of control for the ease of use of the Wigdets drag-and-drop-ability. Some Widgets I’ve tried are holy nightmares in formatting and layout. For something like the Astronomy Picture of the Day I had to edit the widget’s code directly to get it to format better for my sidebar.
I’m not bitter about Widgets. I don’t mind them, but neither are they a great step forward from 2.1.x to 2.2. 😉
What 2.3 does with tagging I’m curious about. Fortunately there’s going to be some sort of importer for Ultimate Tag Warrior, so I’m not going to have to go back through again and get things tagged properly. (I still have about a year and a half to do anyway.) I think, by the end of July, we’ll be seeing 2.3.
Well, there’s a difference between needing a plugin to enable them but the functionality existing regardless, and the functionality actually being migrated from plugin to core. I can’t say I know which was the case…
The functionality has migrated from the plugin to the core in 2.2. The plugin didn’t enable something already inherent; instead, it added a new feature. (Incidentally, adding widgets to the core breaks the K2 theme, as K2 is incompatible with widgets, and a plugin has been written to turn off widgets in 2.2.) Eventually widgets were going to go into the WordPress core–widgets came about, basically, because WordPress.com needed them for its users to customize their blogs; they didn’t want the users to have to touch any code. So if the multi-user WordPress had the widgets functionality as part of the standard core, eventually that would make its way into the stand-alone WordPress installs as a standard feature. And, at long last, it has.
Yet I find the Widgets control panel worked better as the plugin than it does now as part of the new core. It’s probably just a rendering problem with Opera; I’ve discovered that a few features in the Dashboard are disabled in Opera. I can’t help it if I want to use the smallest, fastest, coolest browser on the market. 😉
Oh, now they introduce tagging? I’ll wait for 2.3 before importing the grouch then, and before upgrading the fic archive. Will it retranslate the categories as tags, I wonder/hope?