Musings of a technophile

This morning I decided to go ahead and upgrade this blog to WordPress 2.7 (it was 2.6 before) which had just come out two days ago.  Although nothing (if anything) changed on the pages that normal users see, the admin panel has been completely redone to be more efficient and flexible.  I think it really makes a huge difference as the old Admin panel really looked…well…old.  The new one allows you to drag stuff around on the screen, and I think makes a lot better use of space.

For example, on the old page for writing a new blog entry, I would have to write it up top, and then scroll down to select which options I wanted like category, tags, etc.  The new interface allows me to do all of this in one screen, minimizing my need to scroll around the page.

Additionally thee is now a good use of color and just more of a professional feel to it.  You could compare it to staying in a Howard Johnson versus staying at an Embassy Suites, the environment really just gives you a good feeling.

The only thing I didn’t like too much about the upgrade was just how long it took.  The upgrade process is fairly simple, backup you old files, backup your database, then replace the files with the new versions.  The only problem is that it took over an hour to upload the newest versions of all the files.   I don’t blame anyone for this of course, just wish there was a quicker way to get the job done.

I had two main complaints with 2.6 really, both seem to have been resolved.  The first was that I found managing tags to be extremely over complicated.  Basically if i wanted to put a tag on a previous post, I needed to match the name of another tag, but sometimes I forgot how I had spelled them (i.e. – ASP .NET or ASP.NET).  The new one lets you start writing a tag, and then it will pop up a little window with other tags entered that match what you’ve already typed in.  If that does not work, you can click a box to show a tag cloud to chose from.  SO MUCH BETTER.  The other complaint was more of just the handling of the admin application.  If I wanted to delete a post, it would fail to delete because the delete command interfered with some other php that the site used.  I would have to disable some plugin’s to be able to delete the post correctly.  In the new version, that seems to have been resolved, as I can now delete posts without issue.  There are some other plugins I’ve been wanting to try, but they hadn’t worked in the past; hopefully I can get them working soon.

In any case, I’m glad to be on the new version, and can only hope that it will be able to assist me with enhancing the quality of this blog.