The Hour Glass of Wasted TimeThis site is back online! After suffering nearly 8 hours of downtime over the last few days. What was the reason for this downtime? An unnecessary upgrade.

I’ve been monitoring the progress of WordPress 2.5 for the last little bit and it’s been pretty good. I must say that it’s quite a stable release and, quite possibly, one of the most visually appealing versions of the blogging platform I’ve ever had the opportunity to use. That said, I’m not too happy about how much work I had to do in order to make it accept my website, nor am I happy with the new rules in place when I’m submitting a post. To save others the hassle of upgrading from one of the previous versions of WordPress, I’ll list some of the issues that I’ve faced.

Issue One - The Database

The database was the biggest area of concern for me. I’m using a heavily modified version of a previous WordPress installation and, because of such, I did not go through the transfering pains involved when version 2.3 was released. Although it should have been relatively straight-forward, I spent a small amount of time updating the database to the new schema, and then a great deal of time going through previous posts and correcting the weird characters that had appeared for some unknown reason. Suffice to say, it was not fun. All of the Japanese characters that I had in my posts and sidebar were converted to something completely unreadable and I had to get it fixed pronto.

If I wasn’t such a nit-picker for consistency, this probably wouldn’t have bothered me as much.

Issue Two - The Admin Interface

This was something I thought was going to be resolved by using the Fluency admin theme. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts to modify the CSS to handle some of my plugins, it just did not want to work properly with FireStats. Anything that does not work with FireStats, does not work on my website, as this is my stats package of choice. I’ll admit that I was getting a little tired of looking at the older theme from the early 2.x series, however, I’m happy to be back to it after trying to work through some of the usability issues that I faced.

Of course, one thing that I did like about the admin interface was how clean it looked.  The Recent Comments box and Incoming Links section was nice and smooth, and it’s something that I’ll look at customizing my current admin theme to show as well.  Heck, this might just be a great reason for me to work on an admin theme for WordPress 2.0.0 to 2.3.3 that will work in FireFox and Opera.  It seems that most of the other admin themes just don’t like anything but FF.

Issue Three - Writing Posts

I write my posts through the web interface. I know that I can use applications like Windows Live Writer and a host of others, as I’ve written about them before, but I was not happy with the fact that I still could not write a blog entry from Opera and, after firing up FireFox to write the post, I could not easily add images and format them the way I could with previous versions of the software.

Image handling in WordPress 2.5 has got to be the worst I’ve ever seen, despite all the eye-candy that is in place. I didn’t like the upload screen greying out the rest of the page and showing up with it’s broken CSS layout, nor did I like the fact that when I wanted to change the attributes of the picture after it was in my post, I had to do it through the HTML screen because the Visual Editor didn’t realize that I was talking about the selected picture. If I tried to edit any image on the screen with the on-screen tools, the picture would disappear as though it was never there in the first place.

My apologies go out to any developer that had worked hard on that area of WordPress, but with all the different issues between Opera and FireFox on that one screen, I just couldn’t bring myself to “get used to it.”

The layout of the different functions in the write screens was another bone of contention. I edit my timestamps constantly. Sometimes to have posts publish themselves in the future, other times to back date them a few hours for a nice round posting time. Although the current theme doesn’t show it, all of my blog posts have a time stamp of midnight, noon or six pm. I would explain why, but my oddities are a topic for later discussion.

Issue Four - Plugin Handling

I don’t think there has been a single prime release of WordPress without a large group of people complaining about plugins and how they just won’t work under the new platform. This was also the case with me, where each and every single plugin needed to be updated before it could work. In some cases, this meant that I had to shut some plugins right off because they just would’t work with 2.5. The biggest disappointments were the TLA and LinkWorth plugins that failed to work after the update. Although I don’t make a lot of money with these things, it’d be nice if such simple plugins wouldn’t be killed just because the developers decided to change the name of some functions.

Plugin longevity is the biggest hinderance to the mass adoption of WordPress as the blogging platform of choice. Every three months, plugins need to be re-written. I’ll admit that this is true for perhaps 30% of the extensions out there, but 30% is still a pretty large number. Although the community can certainly appreciate the power and potential of the WordPress platform, it’s next to impossible to take the software seriously when everything someone has done before is rendered obsolete before their work is even a year old.

WordPress dot OrgPeople complained about Microsoft doing stuff like this every three to six years with the big changes between 2000, XP and Vista … why does Automattic think they can do this without any real consequences?

Of course, they don’t make these changes without the negative reactions from the community, but it’s something that needs to be addressed more. If Matt really wants this software to be taken seriously, then he needs to stop writing 4 word blog posts and be a bit more serious about maintaining compatibility. Perhaps, like Windows, plugins could have a compatibility mode and run “as though in version 2.3.3.”

Conclusion

WordPress 2.5 is a great platform if you’re just starting out and use the very same browsers as the people that wrote the software. However, if you’ve been blogging for a while and have everything set up just the way you like it, do yourself a favor and keep using what you’re using. If you’re worried about security patches, just remember that the people at WordPress promised us to continue releasing security fixes for the 2.1.x and 2.2.x line for some time. Whether they’re actually doing that or not, though, is another matter.

Have you upgraded to WordPress 2.5, yet?  What do you think of the changes that have been made?