We have 1217 bugs in our present blog system

Benny June 19, 2010 1 comment

When we launched our business/technical blog system under this domain/URL, it was done with WordPress version 2.7, and later we upgraded it to 2.9 (Carmen McRae release) last year. Now WordPress announced its version 3, with major revisions.  WordPress’ community announced that 1217 bugs were fixed (which means our present blog system has 1217 bugs) which is not a small number. It has 4 digits. 🙂

Next week, we will be upgrading to the new WP 3.0, and we then have started planning  few things that come to focus.

• The first thing would be Database backup.
• The only major task involved in WP upgrades is the theme and plug-in compatibility checking. We may need to change our present theme and sacrifice some plug-in if they do not work with the new version. The directory of the plug-in for 3.0 is yet to be displayed, we are waiting for that.
• We are preparing a list of plug-ins, I have asked team to give up some plug-ins like ‘Listen Now’, I do not see any use in it. We will also remove the video comment plug-in, even if it is compatible with 3.0.
• WordPress has detailed guide for version upgrades, simply following up http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress helped us before.
• Finally, we will check the site for validations, in a previous blog we discussed this too. 4 site design validations you should do before you deliver

Now, why would we want to upgrade while the present 2.9 is working fine? Not just for the terrible figure 1217, But I like the following list of features which I see in WP3.

1. Create multiple blogs/sites with a single control panel. This would be a boon for a company like us, who run more than 4 business sites and blogs. But we need to find how easy it would be.
2. Contextual help on the same page. You get what is what within that section. I am sure this will help our customers who use WordPress or any blogging/CMS for the first time.
3. Custom Menu management: We so far used third party plug-ins for Menu based navigation. Some plug-ins work well with some WordPress versions, and some are not. This is the graceful feature which I welcome.
4. Support for short URLs: We need to check in the short URLs which are automatically created, or we need to use a service like bit.ly

Before we recommend the upgrade to our customers, we want to try and practice it in our system first. Can’t wait!