Wow! The dust is only just settling for WP 2.5, and WP 2.6 is upon us. I know that quite a few of my customers haven’t yet upgraded to WP 2.5 - but I need to keep abreast of the changes due to the fact that new installations on web hosts use the latest available WordPress version.

I set up a test website with WP 2.6 Beta2 to establish whether there are going to be any nasty surprises for RapidNicheWebsites users when they upgrade. I did a quick manual install, and then ran a full RNW upload - all the plugins, and every WP Option set. The RNW Install ran with no errors, and the new theme was correctly selected at the end of the process. Things were looking pretty good!

So - the initial impressions are that the upgrade is far less traumatic thant WP 2.5. I did get one error generated by a plugin - the Organiser plugin - but that is not a mainstream plugin for most RNW users. What I also see is that some of the auto-install options that RapidFormatter sets are not being applied.

Preliminary testing seems to indicate that:

• Almost all of the plugins are OK (just Organiser),
• The widgets are also OK, and
• The setting of the WordPress options is the area that I need to focus on. This is almost trivial in comparison to the massive number of changes that I had to make for WP 2.5.

This is a welcome relief, and hopefully only going take less than a day to investigate and update,  I am allowed to be an optimist …!