I used Tools, Upgrade to quickly, easily and painlessly upgrade my site.

I’m confident we have a stable version of WordPress and am looking forward to the end of the first quarter 2010 for WordPress 3.0

I understand that like any software there’s the fine balance between releasing it promptly to give everyone the benefit of all the goodness, new features, speed / performance, bug fixes etc and holding back one more day, week, month to ensure all the bugs, known or unknown are squashed.

So, do you think that this particular bug should have been found before the release? That’s difficult to say as the diversity of platforms on which WordPress can be installed means that finding these bugs requires even more participation from the community at large. Increased beta testing and participation will increase the chance that these issues will be identified and fixed way before the public gets their hand on the software.

So, when the WordPress team requests beta testers perhaps next time I hope you will be encouraged to participate. I know I certainly will to help make it more secure, better performing and feature rich.

if you want to keep yourself abreast of WordPress development news you can find it by following the link.

Thoughts? Please comment on your experience if you’ve beta tested. Did you feel as though your input was valuable – perhaps you found a bug and got it fixed?

Upgrading was really quite easy. I logged into my WordPress dashboard and saw the message saying that WordPress 2.9 is available, click here to upgrade. So, I did. The upgrade screen reminded me to backup my database, a sensible suggestion, so I quickly clicked through to my favourite backup tool and made backup. I returned to Tools, upgrade and clicked on “Upgrade Automatically”. Within seconds the upgrade process had downloaded the update, uncompressed and installed it.

So, here you are viewing this post in the latest version of WordPress, 2.9 as of post time.

You can always get the latest version of WordPress for download by going here

I hope your upgrade is as smooth as this – if not, leave a comment on what issues you encountered and how you resolved them.

Update: I noticed that the TweetMeme plugin no longer worked after the upgrade. And so did a few others

Update to the update – TweetMeme was fixed within 24 hours of me posting. Good work!

Enjoy WordPress!

WordPress Logo

Late 2009 should see the release of WordPress 2.9. The development never stops, it seems, and we will find that this release is more of a feature release rather than lots of bug and security fixes we’ve been used to for WP 2.8 since its release in June 09. Here’s a brief rundown of some of the highlight features I’ve seen commented on:

Undo with the trash can

One exciting feature is the inclusion of a “Trash can” for your deleted posts / pages. If you’ve ever needed this functionality it’s when you’re blogging down to the wire on some new and ground-breaking post (like always) and you lose it or delete it by accident. Well, this trash can functionality might just save your day next time.

Resize, crop and rotate images

The next exciting feature is image editing right within the admin / dashboard panel of your WordPress site. Granted, it’s not Photoshop but you can make minor adjustments, such as crop, resize and rotate, to uploaded media ready for inclusion in your posts.

jQuery speed improvements

The popular jQuery library is used in WordPress so nearly all sites will benefit from minor improvements that have helped speed up jQuery based scripts.

Image in posts

For theme editors everywhere there will now be a function to insert a thumbnail image into a post without the use of custom fields. A new function called the_post_image() can be embedded in your themes files (within the loop) to have the image included for display.

Repair of tables

For those who shy away from the WordPress tables and / or are not familiar with MySQL there will be an easy way of repairing or just cleaning up the WordPress tables if something goes wrong or is not working as it should. It will still require editing of a core WordPress file but it’s one line and very easy – look out for something like WP_ALLOW_REPAIR.

Sources

Technosailor
WordPress Codex

If you are upgrading a site from a version pre 2.7 then it’s recommended to print and read the extended WordPress upgrade instructions where you will also find details on the simpler 2.7+ upgrades processes.

Upgrading this site was a breeze (thankfully) and I hope you experience the same level of ease.