Now on WordPress 2.6
Friday, July 25th, 2008Well, earlier today while deleting comment spam I managed to inadvertently delete all of the blog comments and pingbacks I’ve received since December, courtesy of a careless tick in a “highlight entire list” checkbox. I had a fairly recent backup, but was nervous about using it, because the last time I restored a WordPress database my post tags (as opposed to categories) broke. I recently read somewhere that WordPress now has much improved support for tags and so I decided to restore the backup and use the exercise as an excuse to install WordPress 2.6 in my server space at WebFaction (install as new app rather than upgrade, thus allowing me to fall back to my old version, 2.5.1, if anything went awry).
Installing the new version together with its MySQL database was a piece of cake thanks to WebFaction’s application setup wizards, and the import of my old database from my local machine was a no-brainer using WordPress’ “Import” facility. The only catch with this procedure is that with the backups being XML files, they don’t preserve images. The image paths within the content are preserved, of course, but the image files themselves must be re-uploaded manually (although, given the dearth of images that I physically host, this ran to the grand total of a single image).
The import seems to have preserved the post tags without problems. WordPress 2.6 looks very similar (in terms of administration tools) to 2.5.1, although I haven’t examined the new features yet. One very welcome improvement is that the side-bar now has a better widget for adding free-form HTML. The relatively poor support for custom content in the side-bar was one of the things I found most disappointing about earlier versions. Now that this has been improved, I’m going to find it hard to pick holes in WordPress. The frequent need to perform updates to fix security holes remains a pain, but that’s my only real remaining gripe. WordPress really is now very good indeed!