Upgrading to WordPress 2.6

I finally upgraded to WordPress 2.6.

I first installed it locally to test it out and make sure that nothing was broken and the website was showing up fine. Good idea on my part.

Turns out there was a permalinks issue.

Everything was totally mucked up. I couldn’t get the post pages to load. I was getting tagged headings on category pages and the rest were just giving a page not found error. Oops!

Am I glad I didn’t directly upgrade live!

But there is good news.

This issue has a fairly simple solution.

Turns out you gotta make sure that the category and tag base fields are not empty in your Permalinks section. So I promptly added category for the the category base and tags for tag base. And that is all it took!

Phew.

On to checking the plugins

Apparently all of them are working. Nothing broken and the site looks ok. Will find out soon enuff if something refuses to work. So far so good.

What about the new features?

Well the three that really stand out are:

1. Plugins Enhanced
   The plugins section offers an enhanced experience and a comparitively clutter free environment. The active plugins are separated from the deactivated ones. There is also a list of recently deactivated plugins.

   Better still you can finally delete plugins from within WordPress. About time this option got added.

2. Post Revisions
   Nice! Just in case you muck up a post and want to go back to an older version, now you can! This is especially useful for people who might have several authors working on the same piece.

   The only thing is I wish there was an option to delete these revisions – I haven’t found one yet. I mean I don’t want to save a version every time I correct a spelling error.

3. Review Template
   I have saved the best for last. Being a designer, this is the ultimate feature for me. Now instead of testing live, one can preview the template in the design section. This totally blew me away! Extremely useful feature for when you are looking to change your theme but want to confirm it works fine first.

There is also the Turbo feature but I haven’t tested it out yet. So I’ll comment on that once I do.

All in all it hasn’t been as bad as I expected and it has been more or less a smooth enuff ride.