WordPress 2.1 Comments

I took the day off from the TV station to wait for FedEx to deliver the new AcoustiSoundâ„¢ multi-track hard disk recorder. I’ve not been wasting time, however, while waiting for it to arrive. Instead, I’ve been working on a new web site for one of my clients, and I figured that this would be as good a time as any to start playing around with WordPress 2.1.

For the most part, I’m pretty impressed. Execution of most functions in the administrative menu is noticeably faster, although I have needed newer versions of a couple of my most regularly used plug-ins (which, it seems, will also work with the 2.0.7 version of WordPress), and a few of my typical customizations needed to be re-written. Otherwise, I was able to develop the core of the new site in only a couple of hours. I’ve got only another hour or so of tweaking, and the core site will be ready to turn over to the client when I meet with him tomorrow.

I’m going to keep most of my sites at 2.0.7 for the moment — I’ll upgrade all the plug-ins first, which should make the transition fairly painless when the time comes.

One thing that I couldn’t get to work at all was the MySQL5 support. The web hosting service that I use really wants everyone to switch over to MySQL5, but, even following the directions to the letter, I couldn’t connect to the database.

My only other gripe with WP2.1 is that the code view is no longer available in the editor. That means that if I want to include a little PHP code within a post or page, I can’t go back and edit it properly if it doesn’t work as expected. I’ve worked around this on the client site — they’ll have little reason to want to do any of this on-the-fly (it’s probably better if I don’t make this functionality available to clients, anyway). But, from an administrative point of view, it’s nice to be able to throw up a PHP page from the editor, instead of having to code it offline as a page template and upload it via FTP.