As you have already seen in this earlier posting – WordPress 2.5 has been released! More details about new and updated features are discussed in this post by Matt Mullenweg at WordPress.org.
Now I do hope your experience is not as harrowing as mine was – I had a small problem with the upgrade – i.e. it crashed my database! I had already done the automatic upgrade on a smaller and more recent blog and it had gone without a hitch. So encouraged by that I headed over to this site and started the same process. Everything went well up until the point it was time to upgrade the database and it was then that the errors started – never could get the database upgrade to come up and even display let alone start. So after trying several different things I decided to nuke the site and start from scratch.
Now I was surprisingly calm about all of this – this version of my database had a ton of tables and other things in it that were old and not used – in fact it is very possible the upgrade process chocked on the database because of that. I was OK with it all as it gave me a chance to start fresh with the site as far as the database goes. Plus with so many new features that I previously used plug-ins for – it allowed me to streamline the entire site and get rid of plug-ins that I would no longer be using.
So off I went to my host and hit the delete button after the reassuring "Are you sure?" prompt. Of course it was not long after that when I realized that by deleting the entire profile from my host for the domain – it also removes all of email accounts and aliases I had set up over the last couple of years. Again, being surprisingly calm about it I just set up my main account and created a catchall account that I can use to not miss any mail to the various aliases. Actually makes management easy because now I can create an email account for my domain at any time and be able to catch the subsequent email. Another sliver lining to this dark cloud of website renewal.
So over the last day I have been slowly recreating popular posts that get a lot of traffic on the site and I am using the Redirection plug-in from Urban Giraffe and it lest me keep an eye on the 404’s that hit so that I can recreate that post. By the way, Google’s Cached Page feature has been a life saver in this matter – I go to the cached version of any of my posts and copy that into Windows Live Writer to re-publish the post. By setting the original post date for the date of the post it retains the exact same URL as the original – then there is no more 404’s for that page.
Here is a snapshot of my current plug-in page to give you an idea of what I am using to enhance the site above and beyond the new features of WordPress 2.5:
My favorite feature so far? The automatic plug-in upgrade feature. With a single click you can upgrade any of your plug-ins. Depending on your host it may require your ftp address, username and password (which it does not retain). Has worked for me like a champ each time.
In closing I just want to say great job to the team that put 2.5 together – it is going to be a great version!
