Wordpress 2.1 Review

January 25th, 2007 | Posted in WordPress 9 Comments »

WordPress 2.1 offers some major new enhancements that I would like to touch upon here. I think these enhancements are the best thing WordPress has done in a while.

Import/Export and the Zen of the Free

In a podcast titled the Zen of the Free, Simon Phipps — chief open source officer at Sun Microsystems — explains that open source content only has appeal if you can get your data in and get your data out. Users want to be like butterflys, trying out a service and then moving to another — they don’t want their data locked into any one application.

For example, if you download a new calendar application, you want it to support ical or vcal format so you can import your data in, and export it when you’re ready to move on.

WordPress allows that. First, their import function allows you to migrate your data from almost any blogging platform.

wordpress import

And just as important, when you’re ready to move on to another blogging platform, you can export your content. (I’m actually not sure if the XML file is supported by other blogging platforms, but I’m assuming it is — at least it should be.)

wordpress export

Visual Editor

WordPress 2.1’s editor is by far superior to the previous version. You can flip back and forth between the WYSIWYG editor and the code editor in a flash. AJAX functionality drives this and many other interface changes. Things load instantly. The editor seems more functional and less prone to error.

Additionally, the editor is user-friendly to beginners. In an interview from the WordPress podcast with Matt Mullenwig, the WordPress founder said that making the code view the default, as many experienced bloggers preferred, was an elitist decision that he wouldn’t make. I agree with Matt and am glad he put effort into probably the most important feature of WordPress — the feature used to write blog posts.

wordpress editor

Image Uploading

I was really happy to see their improvements to the image uploading feature. In previous versions, this image uploading was the most nonintuitive uploading I had ever seen. They have completely fixed it. Now even my wife is happy! Previously I had written that Blogger made image uploading super easy, and that Blogger might be preferable to people who want a blog with no hassle. Now the image uploading feature in WordPress is as easy as image uploading in Blogger. There’s no need to install special photo/image plugins that overcome its shortfalls. In fact the options you can select about sizing and linking might make it even better than Blogger’s image uploading feature.

wordpress image uploading

Image Management

In addition to fixing image uploading, you can also manage your images online now. It used to be that browsing for images was quite awkward. Now you can see thumbnails of your images all organized on their own tab.

wordpress manage uploading

Home Page Options

Another major improvement is the ability to select a home page separate from your blog posts. By default, you home page shows your blog posts. To get around this, you had to do some tricks that were not all that difficult, but nonetheless I remember spending at least 1-2 hours trying to figure it out one night.

Now you can simply set this from within the Options > Reading panel of WordPress.

wordpress home page

Other Enhancements

When you type posts, a new autosave feature saves it every few minutes. This is convenient so that you don’t have to keep clicking the Save and Continue Editing button.

Also, when updating your list of links (blogroll), you can more quickly delete and add links. AJAX makes this process much, much faster. And overall the interface is like lightening compared to the previous.

All in all, this upgrade (which is free, as always) will continue to make WordPress one of the most popular, flexible, and enjoyable blogging platforms out there.

Upgrading

If you installed WordPress within the last year, you can probably upgrade your blog in about 10 seconds. Go to your cPanel and click Fantastico (similar to how you installed it). Click WordPress, and look for information about your WordPress installation. You should probably see a link that says something like “upgrade to 2.1.” All you have to do is click that. (Of course you may want to do a full back up first, and make sure your theme and plugins are compatible with 2.1.)

If your WordPress installation is older, you may have to manually swap in some files, but it’s not difficult. I wish they would find a way to incorporate the auto-installer for older installations.

Note: I’ve been referring all to the version of WordPress that you maintain on your own web host (Lunarpages is the best host out there in my opinion). If you’re using the WordPress that is hosted at Wordpress.com, then all these features have been in place for some time now.

If you’ve been using LiveJournal, Blogger, or some other platform, you may consider switching to WordPress, especially with the easy import functions.

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Suncoast STC - Society for Technical Communication says:

January 30, 2007 at 3:25 am

re a Firefox user, hold your breath and swith to IE just for a minute to test it out. Then switch back. Basically live search shows your search results without refreshing the page. What else? I upgraded the site to Wordpress 2.1, which has a host ofnew features. I explained them on my own blog, which is where that previous link takes you. I’m still adjusting a few things on the site, but feel free to submit your feedback using the comment feature or by directly emailing me. If you have links, info, or other

Brian says:

January 25, 2007 at 12:02 pm

I should mention that I very nearly destroyed my whole blog yesterday while blindly attempting to update to 2.1.

Having performed a couple of problem-free updates in the past few weeks I was feeling overly comfortable with the procedure. I blindly overwrote my existing files with the 2.1 source without creating backups. I tried upgrade.php and got an error. I tried removing my plugins but got the same error.

At this point I manually backed up the mysql database, backed up the entire blog directory, and tried starting from scratch. I tried upgrade.php but no prior version was recognized. I tried executing the default index.php which prompted me to create a new blog. I did the first step of specifying the database location and credentials and attempted to continue to step 2, but WP reported that data existed and I must delete it to start a new blog.

For the heck of it, I visited my root URL (at index.php) again and my blog was there, sans theme and plugins! PHEW!!! It took me 5 minutes to upload and activate everything and all was well again.

To anyone trying to update to 2.1, RTFM!!!!! From what I can tell, 2 simple steps (make a backup, disable plugins) could have saved me a lot of headaches and heartaches!

Tom says:

January 25, 2007 at 3:14 pm

wow, I always find that upgrading is scary. When you wrote,

“I blindly overwrote my existing files with the 2.1 source without creating backups”

do you mean you overwrote your wp-content folder and wp-config files?

I delete the old folders first prior to uploading the new. Luckily I didn’t have problems, but I ran backups first just in case.

Karen says:

January 25, 2007 at 7:33 pm

Thanks for giving us a sneak preview, Tom. I also came across this entry from Laurelle that provides a lot of tips:
http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2007/01/25/fear-not-wordpress-21-and-wordpress-plugins/
(As a new blogger and a WordPress user, I am learning a lot from her articles. Tip to other newbies passing by!)
Bottom line: Upgrading to 2.1 is a job for the weekend! I hope my Dreamhost has some training wheels ready, too.

January 25, 2007 at 10:14 pm

Thanks Karen. I think Lorelle’s site is probably the most useful site on WordPress out there. That said, I still don’t quite understand how she can be so interested, knowledgeable, and helpful on self-hosted WordPress installations when she herself is using the Wordpress.com host. I need to ask her that. Maybe she will read this trackback and respond.

But about upgrading, uhm, it’s not a weekend task. People try to scare you with going into PHP admin and backing up database tables and deleting wp-admin folder and files but not wp-config and not anything under wp-include/cache and deleting first then uploading the new etc. and so on….

Don’t get concerned with that, because you probably installed your blog recently. If you used Fantastico to install it, you can use Fantastico to also upgrade it. Basically, just follow these three steps if you have cPanel:

1. In cPanel, look for the Back Up icon. Back up your system. It is just a matter of clicking a couple of links there.

2. In WordPress, deactivate your plugins (although the only reason you do this, apparently, is that if some are incompatible, your blog won’t look broken after upgrading).

3. In cPanel, go into Fantastico > WordPress and find where you installed your blog. You’ll probably see a little link next to it that says “upgrade to 2.1.” You click that and you’re done.

I don’t know why Lorelle, in her post on upgrading WordPress, doesn’t mention the Fantastic method of upgrading.

Hey, one more thing, Lorelle is so cool that you’ll see her posts appear in your WP dashboard. There’s a lot of useful stuff that appears there.

January 26, 2007 at 3:15 pm

Since I don’t have shell access to my web host I unzipped the WP install archive to a folder and overwrote the existing files via FTP. That’s how I’ve successfully upgraded in the past but I suppose 2.1 was a more major update than the others.

My real mistake was not to make a backup. I certainly lucked out in the end!

February 4, 2007 at 6:32 pm

Finally did my update and it was easy after all. Backup, disable plugins, and update (using the one-click method on Dreamhost.com) I’m glad I waited a bit because my theme wasn’t updated when 2.1 first came out. Unfortunately, I did not truly heed Brian’s words of warning. If I had read the page correctly, I could have updated my favorite form plug-in from Green Beast. He made two – and I took the wrong one (which obviously made no sense! I needed “WordPress-Ready Contact Form v.2.0WP” from
http://green-beast.com/blog/?page_id=136. Sigh! Other than reading errors… The ease of updating does show how nice it is when someone codes nicely! It makes me look forward to listening to this podcast on this topic from itconversations:
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1717.html

It’s also nice when there is a helpful community of users to lean on!

PS I added that subscribe-to-comments plug-in that you recommended. I was running out of time then so I may have missed something: where did you add the “subscribe w/o commenting” bit? TIA!