The WordPress LogoIt’s almost that time of year again. The developers at Automattic and elsewhere around the world have been putting together the latest version of WordPress, a blogging platform used on this and a billion other sites, and it’s just about ready for release. Dubbed WordPress 2.6, this next version of the popular software is certainly due to make waves. It’s quick, smooth, more secure, the media gallery is easier to use … this release has so many things going for it.

So why aren’t we hearing the typical tripe that we should all be upgrading the second it’s released to the interwebs?

Convincing the Dubious

I am currently responsible for the maintenance and well-being of 21 different websites, 19 of which are WordPress related. While this is hardly a large number, it can be quite a headache to upgrade all of these sites to the latest release of WordPress. Everybody has their various plugins that are and aren’t compatible with specific releases of the blogging software and, naturally, there are quite a few database considerations that need to be taken into account. Will the upgrade damage the database? Will weird characters replace the ampersands and apostrophies?

Well … there’s only one way to find out: testing.

One of the sites that I look after is still running WordPress 2.1. Of all the sites to upgrade, that one would be the most difficult. It has an un-supported image gallery with close to a thousand pictures, captions and everything else, not to mention lots of site-specific customizations to the base code which may or may not be possible with the new releases of the code. Because of this, when it comes time to test upgrades, this is the site that I try to bring up to code.

In a development environment, of course.

A Flawless Upgrade?

Thanks to the Japanese Summer, my bouts of insomnia have become much more frequent. While this does have a pretty bad impact on my performance during the day, I can get quite a bit of stuff done at night. This was definately the case for me yesterday when I installed the Release Candidate of WordPress on my development site and started to slowly go through the trouble of upgrading the two year old website. After 40 minutes of installation, plugin upgrades, theme modifications and importing data through the XML data import screens (which I find is much better than simply upgrading a database), I was 90% complete and had only dealing with the massive image gallery remaining, as well as pulling in lots of the data collected by various plugins over the years. But most of this could be done through MySQL Query Browser.

Could it have been a flawless upgrade?

I quickly clicked through the site and looked for any signs that the content was changed or otherwise damaged through some weird type of UTF/Non-UTF issue, but there were no problems that I could find. It seems that the install went flawlessly.

Not wanting to get my hopes up too high, I then went to do something that has been a bone of contention for quite some time: writing a post using Opera.

I love using the Opera browser. The caching is great. The language support is great. Heck, everything about the browser is great. That said, it’s been next to impossible to write pages and posts through the WordPress admin screens because of an issue with the TinyMCE editor. After writing a paragraph or two in the editor, the wrapping would begin to fail, causing an entire paragraph to appear in a single line. This problem isn’t just limited to the editor, though, as if we were to post something with this problem, the front page would also show a single line. For this reason alone, I’ve had FireFox installed on my system. The other browser is used only to write content and Stumble sites (which is something else that Opera can’t easily do).

So, with better Opera support being one of the advertized features, would the Release Candidate finally give me the opportunity to use my preferred browser? In a word: yes. There are no problems when writing a page or a post in Opera.

How about the media browser? The issues that I had faced with version 2.5 and 2.5.1 seem to have been resolved.

The plugins? These seem to have no trouble after being updated to the most current release, either. I’ll need to modify the Social Bookmarking Reloaded to include the JapanSoc link and image, but that’s such a small thing that I wouldn’t even call it a hassle.

How about Embink? Yes … Embink will work nicely with 2.6. There’s nothing that I need to change for the initial alpha release of my software (which I’m thinking about releasing on August 2nd, to mark the 1st year anniversary of moving to Japan). The one thing that people will need to remember, though, is that XML-RPC (the publishing protocols) are now disabled by default. That said, if you’re upgrading, they will continue to be active. Otherwise, you’ll need to go into the Options / Writing tab, and enable the XML-RPC option.

The Verdict

All in all, I think that 2.6 is going to be one of the nicest releases since 2.1 came by to overhaul the 2.0 line. The system is smooth, responsive, and plays nice with others.

Word has it that WordPress MU 2.6 will also be released in the near future. I haven’t had the opportunity to play with the new version of MU but, if it turns out to be just as useful and powerful as the standalone 2.6, I think I’ll put all 19 WordPress blogs under the same tent.

You can download this latest RC release of WordPress from the Release Archive.
Are you looking forward to the next release of WordPress? Will you be upgrading sooner rather than later?