SporkBomb

As of today at 4:30PM EST, this blog is running on the second release candidate of WordPress 2.5. On the 26th of this month, Matt Mullenweg posted a short screencast of WP 2.5’s new features. This screencast inspired me to give the new version a try. On a side note, I hope Matt gets better in his dental situation (watch the screencast for more info).

In case you’re thinking about testing the new WP 2.5 RC2, here are the answers to some questions I had, that may not be intuitive to find.

1. No matter what you’re changing on your blog, always, always backup. You’ll find detailed backup instructions here.
2. The upgrade process is the same as the usual process you go through for any 2.X.X version. Use the upgrade instructions here for a short description of what you need to do; the instructions here for more detailed instructions.
3. Check the compatibility of your plugins by visiting this place. If you have lots of plugins which you depend on, I would advise you to hold the deployment of this upgrade. Wait until version 2.5 has been released and the authors of the plugins have had a chance to revise their code. One good thing about 2.5 is that it hasn’t modified the internals of WordPress too heavily⁽¹⁾.
4. Theme operation has also not been affected. See the point above.

I’d like to thank Matt Mullenweg, Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, Liz Danzico, and the WordPress community for making this release happen.

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^{(1) Matt Mullenweg states that WordPress 2.5 has a redesigned look in order to improve interaction, but that it has not heavily modified the internal structure of the software. “Finally with regards to theme and plugin compatibility, we’ve had no reports of any broken themes in this upgrade, which makes sense because we didn’t really change anything core about themes, just added new optional capabilities like Gravatars. Plugins that work with the admin may require updating to take advantage of the new, cleaner UI in WordPress 2.5.”}