Upgrading to WordPress 3.0

By Shamus Posted Thursday Jun 17, 2010

Filed under: Notices 31 comments

The plan for this evening: I’ll be upgrading this site to WordPress 3.0, which is the software that runs this blog. The site may break, go down, show up with the wrong theme, give off a foul odor, or otherwise fail to properly dispense entertainment.

EDIT: All done. I’m sure you’ll let me know if you see anything amiss.

EDIT 2: You can’t see it, but the administration interface is kind of nice in a “oooh, slightly different shade of gray!” sort of way. The WP site claims there are tons of new features and 1,200 bugfixes. It all feels exactly the same to me. I don’t think I could even tell you a single new feature they’ve added in the last two years that I’ve used or even noticed.

That sounds like a complaint, but it’s actually praise from an engineering standpoint. It means they’re adding features without obfuscating existing features and cluttering up the interface. They’re growing the system without falling into the MS Office school of overbearing kitchen-sink featurism.

EDIT 3: Okay, I just spotted an outstanding feature. I read all comments in one big moderation queue, because if I manually visited each thread I’d never be able to keep up. The disadvantage is that I would just see all comments in chronological order without any indication of how they might be threaded. I’d see a comment like, “I can’t see how that could ever happen”, and have NO IDEA what they were talking about. I’d have to visit the post and scroll down to see the structure of the conversation. Now replies indicate when they are replies, and even have links to the parent.

 


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31 thoughts on “Upgrading to WordPress 3.0

  1. Unbeliever says:

    Have fun… :)

    We’ll be back tomorrow to view the carnage…

  2. Xbolt says:

    You’re back! But with the wrong theme…

  3. Well, things seem to be working at least!

  4. Steve C says:

    Comments look to different to me compared to a few days ago. I like it!

    1. Daf says:

      They do seem to be more gradiated… graded? The bit where it goes from light to dark… in a good way. :)

  5. ccesarano says:

    Off-topic and probably discussed a thousand times somewhere on this site: I finally had to use Word 2007 at a temp job lately, and to be honest, I liked it a lot better. I’ve heard tons of complaints about it, but aside from a couple choices in interface I felt like options were available to me in fewer button clicks. It was way different, but it was also a lot better.

    Unfortunately I’m back to using OpenOffice all the time until I get a real “permanent” job that can afford the real deal.

    1. eri says:

      Personally, I hate how inconsistent it is. Some things get huge buttons while other things are tucked away in corners never to be seen again. Headers and footers are a bitch to get working, and overall the use of tabs means more clicks to get to the same features. Adjusting things like line spacing should be simple considering how common it is for academic articles, but apparently it just wasn’t important enough to warrant a clear spot in the program.

      That said, 95% of the time, using Word 2007 is pretty easy if you know where to look for stuff. Coming out of Word 97 and later OpenOffice.org, though, it’s hard to see the interface as more advanced. OpenOffice is cluttered, but at least it has everything you need at a glance. It seems like Word 2007 was designed with interface trends and visual appeal in mind, less so about actual functionality.

      1. ccesarano says:

        That’s where I disagree. It probably depends on what it is you are looking for, but now I have a sense of how it is organized. Once I started understanding what it is I needed I was able to switch back and forth between the different things I required. The top menu now technically holds more data with tabs. I don’t have to check to see if what I want falls into one of the drop-down categories, then wait for a window to open up and to click through tabs to finally get to my destination.

        It might ultimately depend on your goals, and might also depend on how used to doing things a certain way you got. To me, however, 2007 is a major improvement.

  6. acronix says:

    From where I stand, I can´t see any differences neither. A good sign!

  7. Zukhramm says:

    I had some problems accessing the site earlier, I guess this explains that.

    1. Mari says:

      Same here. But yay for an easy upgrade.

  8. Blake says:

    *sniffs the air*
    Is that the site or is it just me?

    1. Irridium says:

      No, that was me.

      Sorry…

  9. Psithief says:

    Have you even read the source code, Shamus? It’s very easy to improve upon. *giggles maniacally*

  10. Factoid says:

    I just starting to write for a blog, and it still runs wordpress 2.8. I can tell you that I would really like some of the features I’ve seen in 2.9 and 3.0

    I’m not an administrator, though, so I don’t have many privileges and in later versions they’ve made things like embedding video clips and such easier. Just to be able to embed a video in older versions you have to be at least an editor or the whole blog has to allow unfiltered HTML which is a security vulnerability.

    New versions have features like oEmbed support which allows easy embedding from all the popular video sources like hulu, vimeo, google video, youtube, etc…

    You need a lot fewer plugins to improve the functionality, it seems.

  11. somebodys_kid says:

    OH MY GOD!! I CAN’T SEE ANYTHING!!
    Oh, right, have to turn the monitor on…my bad.
    Everything looks great on this end.

  12. Clint Olson says:

    1,2000 bugfixes, eh? Methinks the comma may be in the wrong place, or there’s an extra zero ;)

    1. acronix says:

      In my country, comas are used to denote decimals. So there may be actually three extra zeroes, and they just fixed one bug and a bit of another.

      1. X2-Eliah says:

        Then again, a decimal should never end with a zero – or row of zeroes.

        1. Jarenth says:

          That’s just what they want you to think.

        2. Primogenitor says:

          Why not? I think it is useful to separate between 1.0 (a floating point number) and 1 (an integer).

          1. X2-Eliah says:

            We’re talking basic maths, not computer terms. Anyway, waht’s wrong with 1`200 ?

            1. acronix says:

              When some of us arrived, it said “1,2000”

        3. Valaqil says:

          Sure it should. What about significant figures? They indicate a level of precision.

        4. Felblood says:

          –Unless your country uses zeros do denote decimal places that are significant. This is very important for knowing your margin of error when doing math on real measurements.

  13. Maldeus says:

    I can’t see how that could ever happen.

  14. mark says:

    oh yeah? moderate this!

    8======B

    yes, juvenile, i know… ;)

  15. Galenor says:

    “It all feels exactly the same to me. I don't think I could even tell you a single new feature they've added in the last two years that I've used or even noticed.”

    Oh my god, I love this feeling. The feeling of applying a huge update to a piece of software, using it, and going “…it looks exactly the same as before. YAY!”

    I still blunder about in Office 2010, trying to figure out where all of my old options ran off to. I guess I just like coming back to a familiar face. :)

    1. Deoxy says:

      I came to the comment thread with a specific comment in mind… and you just covered it entirely.

      Wow, WordPress – you did something RIGHT. Very cool.

      (and yes, playing fruit-basket turn-over with the location of all your features every release, like MS does, REALLY REALLY REALLY SUCKS.)

  16. SolkaTruesilver says:

    @Edit3:

    You cannot even click on the post to be moderated to be linked to where it was posted?

    Sounds like a feature that could be part of an easy patch :-)

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