Upgrading from WordPress 2.3 or earlier, to WordPress 2.5 is not a trivial task - if you have a sophisticated WordPress-based website or blog.

Technical / Coding

The main technical reasons why you might experience problems are the following:

• The Widget format / way of functioning has changed, and so widgets coded to work with Version 2.3 don’t work with WordPress 2.5.
• The menu structure of the Admin section has changed, so this can affect some plugins - in terms of where their option pages attempt to hook into the admin menu.
• If for any reason your plugins allow you to include / exclude Pages, Posts or Categories based on ID numbers (each of these get a unique ID created within WordPress each time you create a Page, Post or Category) - you’re now going to be stuck. Whereas in the past you could always see what the ID number was for any of the main WordPress ‘objects’, these are now no longer displayed - so you cannot apply some of the customisations you might be used to.
• The WYSIWYG editor has changed, so the additional buttons that some plugins attach to the editor toolbars could be affected. (The plugins in RNW have been affected.)

Using WordPress 2.5

From a use perspective, you might also encounter some difficulties:

• The menu structure has changed, so you’re going to need to look for menu items in different places.
• The Post/Page format has changed. I don’t like the fact that the standard format has the page left justified, and it doesn’t span the full width of the page.
• More importantly - some of the droplists located on the RHS of the Post/Page area have been moved below the edit area. This in effect takes these editing functions ‘below the fold’ - and so it is pretty easy to forget to set your Category, or Page template - as these are out of sight (and therefore can be out of mind if you’re in a hurry…).
• The Page/Post / Category lists (in Manage) - no longer have an Edit / Delete link in the list, and the object names are not underlined to indicated that the names are active links, and that is how you access the edit window. I can see a few WordPress newbies staring at these lists wondering how to edit posts they have created …

What’s Good About The Upgrade

It’s not all doom and gloom:

• The one really BIG improvement is that the WYSIWYG editor no longer screws up DIV tag layouts by automatically replacing them with P tags. This was a major source of irritation for me with the previous versions. I like the ease of use of the WYSIWIG editor for general posting, but need the fine-formatting options that wrapping parts of your content in DIV tags allows you to do.
• The post editor ‘remembers’ which format you were in when you do a Save, so if you’re in the Text editor, you don’t have to keep switching back from the WYSIWYG editor after each save.
• The button to open the Advanced Toolbar is on the first toolbar (not hidden on the second as in previous versions), and the toolbar remembers to remain open or closed / based on the setting when you last had the editing section open.
• While the Widgets layout is no longer ‘visual’, the new format makes it much easier, and less messy to create multi-instance widgets. You no longer need to have a droplist indicating how many ‘instances’ of a widget you will be using in your sidebars. You just add the widget as many times as you want, and the code sorts out the unique widget ID - instead of you having to do it manually.
• The Widget format also makes it ‘cleaner’ to add more sidebars. So - if you want to create multi-zoned sites with different sidebars for each zone, the new Widget page will make it easy to do so, without the page becoming cluttered with visual representations of multiple sidebars.

OK - enough of an overview of the WordPress changes. I have no choice but to upgrade, as I have many customers who will that RapidNicheWebsites cater for the latest version. For me, the cleaner handling of DIV tags in the content area is the only incentive would have needed to do the upgrade as soon as possible.

Over the next couple of days, I will be covering the changes that I had to make in RNW, and adjustments I had to make in the way that I use WordPress 2.5 and RapidNicheWebsites.