In one sentence – Upgrade to WordPress 2.8.4 right now!!

That is unless you want to leave your blog open to being hacked. If you are using an older version of WordPress, your blog has security vulnerabilities. Thankfully, these security loopholes have been fixed in WordPress.

If you don’t think this can happen to you, think again!

One of my websites which is based on a WordPress blog and was running on version 2.0.9 got hacked a while back. I would never have found out if not for Google Webmaster Tools.

So if you have not signed up for that yet, better do so asap as they have some very good tools which will help with optimizing your website/blog.
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As most of you may have realized by now, it is always a good idea to wait a while before upgrading to the latest version of WordPress.

One reason is you have to give the plugin authors time to update, if any are needed on their plugins. The second advantage to waiting is that all the security bugs get ironed out. In case you noticed, WP 2.8 was followed by 2.8.1 up to 2.8.4 pretty quickly.

I finally upgraded at 2.8.4 and all the plugins seem to be working flawlessly and I haven’t even updated all of them as yet so that is step number two.

Now for the new features:
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Did you recently upgrade to WP 2.7 and noticed that your comment author link is a bit messed up?

If you are also using the Semiologic do-follow plugin, you might also have noticed that it is no longer working.

SOLUTION
Look in your plugins to see if you have a Google Analyticator plugin. Just deactivate it and everything will be back to normal.

It seems like there is a new WordPress version every few months. This is great from one perspective i.e. we get great new features and it just keeps getting better. However, seeing from the other end of the spectrum it also means that we have to upgrade and make changes to our theme and make sure there are no broken plugins.

My last version was WP 2.5.1 and I finally upgraded to 2.7 last night. It was more or less a painless task since all of my plugins still work with 2.7. At most I had to update them via the one-click plugin update (it is more like 2 clicks but who’s counting ).

However, it did require some changes in my theme. I could have lived without these changes as my theme did not break … I just wanted some of the new features to work.

So here’s the low down on some of the main changes in WordPress 2.7 and how to deal with them:

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I’ve had that annoying yellow bar telling me to upgrade to WP 2.6.1 for a while. Today I finally decided to give it a go and just in time, too. Now the bar reads download WordPress 2.6.2. Wow! These guys are fast.

Saved from two upgrades. Phew!

Here’s the lowdown on why you should upgrade to 2.6.2

It is most important for those of you who allow open registrations on your blogs. Of course there are some bug fixes, too. So best to upgrade.

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.

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While I was busy designing his blog, my friend Rob beat me to this announcement (as soon as I had given him the update on WP). Now I can either re-do the whole thing again or point you to his post so you can read about all the great new features. Oh and he has a video up as well.

See Rob’s Post

And I just upgraded two of my websites to WP 2.5.1

Although some of the features (word count, post revisions, turbo blog) in 2.6 are tempting me to upgrade, I think I will wait a bit and make sure the plugin authors update their plugins to ensure compatibility with 2.6. I’m betting by the time that happens and I get on the 2.6 bandwagon, it will be time for 2.7 … not that I’m complaining

I finally took the plunge and upgraded this blog to WP 2.5.1

Since my previous version wasn’t very old, either, this was a pretty smooth transition. All the plugins were still working although some had newer version. This brings me to one of the best features of this version – you can update plugins automatically from inside the control panel by just clicking one link. Oh and you also need to add your ftp info so it can unzip and add the new files. Is that cool or what!?

However, if you upgrade from an older version and I mean a much older version then there might be some changes to be made. For example some plugins might be outdated especially tag related plugins as WP 2.5.1 has its own inbuilt tags option now and a pretty good one at that. For those of you who were using the wp links tag, will need to shift to wp bookmarks.

But mainly it is just little tweaks and so worth the effort. WP 2.5.1 offers a great new interface and some unique and intuitive new features. I’ll say it is a major improvement and one you will notice in an instant.