Should You Upgrade to WordPress 2.8 Immediately?

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

For those of you reading this morning, June 11, 2009, WordPress 2.8 was just released!

This is exciting news for several reasons, nearly all of which are developer or back-end related. The most significant change for the user will surely be the built-in theme browser, which works identically to the plugin theme browser. Widgets, screen options and code editing have all been considerably improved. There will shortly be several thousand blog posts going into intricate detail on all of these topics, watch for them in the technical news.

However, as you can imagine, the most exciting new feature in my opinion is being able to specify how many blog posts to view on the “Edit Posts” administration page. I will, of course, be setting the number of posts to 101. I have the option set to 100 on another blog (There Is NO Box, see below), and it’s much easier to scroll down through a long list of old posts than it is to page through them 20 at a time.

Currently, I have 2.8 installed on localhost and on There Is NO Box. At least one of my plugins is stumbling, and I’ll be watching the 2.8 security news very closely.

Should you upgrade immediately?

No.

Here’s 5 reasons:

1. No automatic downgrade: if you don’t want 2.8 after it’s installed, you have to do a lot of work to downgrade.
2. Theme breakage: you won’t know ahead of time whether your theme will survive the upgrade.
3. Plugin breakage: I’m already having trouble with one of my plugins.
4. Interface issues: Cannot edit the time stamps on posts. This is annoying as it prevents me from scheduling posts in advance, and moving up extensively reworked previously published articles for fresh publication. Here’s a report of post editing problems.
5. Security issues: malicious hackers won’t report security issues in the development code; they will exploit them later.

If you’re an expert, and you’re comfortable with running a less-than-functional system for a while, none of these issues are a show stopper. However, if you’re a newbie, and notions of HTML and PHP give you the heebie jeebies, sign up for the newsletter and I’ll let you know when I update Website In A Weekend.

Theme breakage

So far, Thesis Theme seems to be holding up very well, but it’s still early. I have a number of other non-production web sites running a variety of themes, I’ll be checking on them shortly.

Plugin breakage

I’m already having problems with one of my main plugins, Drain Hole. 2.8 reports bad code in one of this plugin’s files, but I haven’t had time to deal with it yet. Drain Hole is an important plugin for me, so I won’t upgrade Website In A Weekend until I know it’s working correctly. I’ll be on the lookout for others, and will report as I find them.

Security issues

Wait a week or two. Invariably, right after a public release, 2 or 3 hideous security issues pop up. This is normal. Let 2.8 get pounded on by the public at large for a couple of weeks, then upgrade. Because the source code is open, malicious hackers can watch for security holes to exploit once the code is released. No sense for them to attempt exploits beforehand as only developers will be running code in development… and would fix exploits as they occur. Once a few million blogs get updated by non-technical users, there’s some low hanging fruit for the hackers.

For those of you who do upgrade anyway (you know who you are), by all means leave a comment about your experience.

For what it’s worth, here’s my end-of-day June 11 2009 search terms as reported by WordPress Stats plugin

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It’s interesting that I got so many results so quickly. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

Tagged as: Security, Themes