Clean install of WordPress 2.0 as easy as it ever was (EASY) and first impressions

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Well, what started out as being an attempt to upgrade a WordPress 1.5 blog that I barely used (just in case things went horribly wrong) to WordPress 2.0 ended up having to become a test of a fresh install because, like an idiot when I was going to backup my wp-config.php file, I instead accidentally deleted it – leaving me with no access at all to that former blog.  Good thing it wasn’t important….so that upgrade difficulty was a clear and blatant USER error (and I couldn’t feel more stupid about it).

So I still have no personal comments on the upgrade path… but I can tell you that doing a fresh install of WordPress 2.0 is exactly as easy as it was with 1.5 — taking literally seconds to complete once you’ve uploaded the files to your webhost and set up a mysql database for it (which your webhost can usually do for you).

The new UI looks VERY much like that over at Wordpress.com, although it’s notably missing the ‘Feedback’ button for sending hugs & bugs.  Not sure why you wouldn’t want to keep that in the hosted version of WP, especially since the user community at large doesn’t know how to enter bugs into WordPress’s tracking system..  The new user interface is very professional looking, and a little nicer on the eyes in this user’s opinion.

Anyhow, while others have complained about it, I like the new WYSIWYG interface (which is easily turned off for those who aren’t interested or don’t need it). Personally, while I can code HTML with the best of them, when I’m blogging I just want to write, and the easiest way to do that and have things be formatted the way I want them to is with a WYSIWYG editor.   While WP 1.5 had wysiwyg plugins available, they seemed to slow down my server enormously and I resorted instead to using BlogJet’s window’s client to do all of my WP posts in a rich text environment.  The one bummer was that when I clicked on the icon to insert a hyperlink, the window that popped up was too small to fit all of the hyperlink contents into it, and was not resizeable.  Perhaps this is a browser specific problem (I’m using Firefox 1.5 on Windows), but that’s a rather big problem considering that links are half of what bring blogs alive.  Any other Firefox users experiencing this?

I’ve also started playing around a little bit with themes, and thus far I’ve only tried a few wordpress 1.5 themes, but so far so good in that they’ve all worked in wordpress 2.0.  Granted, I only tried 6 so far (Aesthetic 1.5, akhdian 1.1, Almost Spring 1.0, Amsterdam Nights 1.5, Anthurium Mix, and Batavia 1.5.1.1), but I’ll test more and report back later.  Alas, one of my favorite themes, Semiologic, had many of its included plugins broken by WP 2.0, and while a new version (Semiologic v3.2) that works with WordPress 2.0 is purported to be available, I’ve yet to find a download link for it (and have emailed the author, the ever-brilliant Denis De Bernardy) to find out where the download link is (or when it will be available)

The much hyped uber-spam killing mechanism aka the plugin Akismet is built into the install, but needs to be activated by the user before it works – and that user must first create a wordpress.com account in order to get an API key that will be needed in order to use the Akismet plugin.  Personally, if “included anti-spam plugins” are touted to be one of the features of the WordPress 2.0 release, one shouldn’t need to register anywhere in order to be able to utilize them – and they should be activated by default (just my 2 cents).

When I have more time to delve further into WP 2.0 (and to perform an actual upgrade to one of my existing blogs), I’ll post here as always.