I did it.
I bit the bullet.
I upgraded to WordPress 2.9.
The upgrade to 2.8 several months ago left me shellshocked. It didn’t go smoothly, as WordPress 2.8 is a bloated memory beast. The later bugfix releases of the 2.8 branch brought the memory requirements back in line, and it turned out to be a solid release overall.
I’d planned upon waiting on 2.9, to see what was happening in the WP community and to see if there were any nasty bugs.
But it was also snowy, and I needed some decompression after the week, so I downloaded the ZIP file and started uploading files to my server.
WordPress 2.9 ran.
However, it does have a few memory problems. Some pages, like the Dashboard, wouldn’t load. Other pages were fine.
I’ve stripped down my install as tight as I can. If I didn’t absolutely need a plugin, I’ve disabled it. Which is why I’m glad that my coding standards have improved over the years; the modifications I’ve made to my present theme are done in such a way that if a given plugin (and the function it adds) are missing, the website won’t crash. 🙂
However, this means that certain things, like the crossposters, aren’t up and running. I don’t mind that, but I also recognize that it’s not ideal.
Otherise, I can’t tell what’s different about WordPress 2.9. The screens look the same under the hood. I don’t notice any new bells-and-whistles.
I have contacted my webhost to see if the memory limit on my account can be upped to, say, 24 megabytes, which should be enough for me to safely run the various crossposters and such.
Every time I upgrade with WordPress or Movable Type, the software seems to be more and more bloated. I’m fairly sure that writing software which doesn’t go in that direction should be possible, so I’m not sure why it seems to happen so often. :/
The problem with WordPress, at least as I see it, is that the community has decided that the software needs to do everything under the sun and that it’s a full-fledged, industrial-strength CMS. I’m seriously expecting that, someday very soon, it’s going to have Wiki-like capabilities built in. It’s like WordPress has Drupal-envy or something. Five years ago, it was a nice little blogging platform. Now it’s a monster, and some decisions aren’t especially well thought through. A good example is post revisions; they should be optional, and editing code to turn them off (which actually doesn’t about 10 percent of the time) isn’t a sensible design decision.
Another problem is that, under the hood, the developers want the software to have lots of bells and whistles so that the people blogging with it feel like they’re on the cutting edge, that they’re using an application and not a website. This means lots of scripts and widgets and other pieces with monster overhead.
I experimented with Habari on a test blog a few months ago. It made me wish for a stripped-down WordPress.