Last night I upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.0, which was released at the end of last year. Though it contains some nice improvements, particularly in the user/admin interface, the performance was less than spectacular. The pages took much longer to load; I suspected that some of the plugins may be at fault. Sure enough, upon disabling all plugins, the site ran faster. However, since we rely on some of the plugin functionality, I decided to downgrade the site back to version 1.5.2.

It may be best to wait a few months before attempting to upgrade again. This will allow time for other developers to create plugins that work better with WordPress 2.0.

The main plugin at fault was “Extended Live Archives”, which provides the cool AJAX viewer for browsing through posts on the Archives page.

A question now looms whether we should upgrade the CCE site to WordPress 2.0. I figure that since it’s primary use is as a CMS and not a blog, it uses less plugins and thus performance may not be hindered. Additionally, I have been porting the Palmer site into WordPress 2.0, and the site seems to run OK… no worse than the CCE site runs on WordPress 1.5.2.

Read this article more about what’s new in WordPress 2.0.

A few notes from my experiences already:

  • The admin interface is more colorful and uses AJAX in some places for ease of usability, most notably when Deleting an item, and also receiving a Confirmation Flash Notice at the top of the page after having successfully completed some action.
  • It is much easier to upload images and files to a post. The Write Post page contains an embedded file uploaded/browser for inserting images and files directly into your posts. All uploaded files (by default) are stored and organized in /wp-content/uploads/(year)/(month)/ where year and month reflect the current date of the upload.
  • In FIREFOX and IE (I assume), there is a Rich Text Editor available when writing posts. This is particularly useful for those with little or no html knowledge, yet are comfortable with a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get… e.g. Microsoft Word). editing environment. SAFARI on the Mac still lacks some Javascript functionality, and thus does not have the Rich Text Editor available. This however is not all that bad…
  • …Using the Rich Text Editor screws up Relative Links. The Rich Text Editor detects relative links (if you edit directly in html mode) and will convert them to absolute links… incorrectly (it converts the link using the wrong query path). Safari is advantageous because it allows you to save posts with relative links intact. This is extremely noteworthy, particularly for the CCE and Palmer sites which have a lot of static pages that may link to each other. If we ever move a site to a new location or domain, relative links will keep working while absolute links will break….
  • Thus, as I have been working on porting the Palmer site, I’ve been using a hybrid approach. I use Firefox to do the bulk of the admin work since it contains the Rich Text Editor. However, I use Safari whenever I need to create a relative link as part of a Page’s content. It’s kind of a pain, but it gives the best of both worlds. Hopefully the guys at WordPress will fix this Rich Text Editor (bug, feature, etc… which is it?) on a later version.

I hope this wasn’t too confusing.

Overall I think WordPress 2.0 is a nice improvement and is fairly intuitive, but it definitely has its kinks. Knowing and discovering the tricks like those above will help. Since the OI site is primarily used as a blog and relies on some cool plugins, I thnk keeping it at version 1.5.2 is okay for now. However, the Palmer site runs fine on WordPress 2.0, so there is no reason to revert it back. The CCE site should probably be upgraded to 2.0 as well.

FYI, the link to the CCE and Palmer WordPress development sites:
http://ccelter-dev.ucsd.edu/wordpress
http://pallter-dev.ucsd.edu/wordpress

Quick note: All the sites are using the same theme, each one tweaked differently. I added a dark-blueish background to this site to help the pages stand out better.