WordPress 2.6 Is Out… But I’d Recommend Some Procrastination

THOSE DILIGENT developers in the WordPress community have gone and released the latest iteration of WordPress (V2.6) almost a month earlier than planned, but I wouldn’t be rushing to upgrade just yet if I was you.

I’m a long time WordPress user and should have known better, but driven by all the hype of WP 2.5, I willingly went ahead and upgraded to that version pretty much days after it was released, only to be confronted by numerous issues and really obvious problems that should have been sorted in the testing of the release. Pretty quickly afterwards a V2.5.1 was issued to address the growing problems list but even that didn’t fix everything.

So, although I’m a huge fan of the open source blog/CMS software I’m going to recommend that you wait a few weeks for the dust to settle and let the early adopters go through all the grief first before you commit your website to the upgrade process. Let’s face it, WP 2.6.1 will be along any time now with – probably – a list of fixes just like usual.

Having said that there are a few cute improvements in this 2.6 release as follows:-

• Version Control for draft posts/pages
• Improved Press-It functionality
• A theme ‘preview’ function
• More Avatar functions
• Enhanced plugin management

And of course there are a bunch of bug fixes and probably a whole lot of other minor enhancements mixed in there as well. Still, I ended up having to rebuild my site from scratch, move hosted, move platform and eventually redesign my entire site the last time I tried to upgrade.

I’m thinking it’s a better idea this time around to just sit on my ass for a while and see how everyone else gets on, and then maybe consider the upgrade around 2.6.1. Of course I’ll probably have to get around to building my test site for that too I suppose. Oh well, so much for a bit of procrastination.