WordPress 2.5
Well, I’m upgraded, and so far it hasn’t been too painful.
I decided not to dive straight in because some of my web sites rely heavily on plugins and I wanted to be sure they’d be OK. I’m still not 100% confident, but we have progress.
Priority #1 was Bad Behavior, which the plug-in compatibility list originally listed as problematic. Someone did publish a fix, but I decided to wait for Michael Hampton just in case, and very soon he came through with a new version.
Also a firm requirement on some of my sites was the LiveJournal Cross-Poster. That also has issues, and doesn’t appear to be being maintained by the original author. Thankfully the fix posted here appears to work. However, this does raise a wider issue about upgrading. Generally I upgrade by simply replacing files, but it is clear from that issue that sometimes whole files of WordPress code get deprecated. It would be nice to know what they are so we can remove them. (Yes, I know, I should research it myself and post it to the Codex.)
The only other issue I have had so far relates to a couple of sites that use derivatives of Sadish Bala’s Mistylook theme. Under IE 6 the sidebar drops down to the bottom of the page when you upgrade to 2.5. Other browsers (including IE 7) appear to be fine. Shaving a few pixels off the width of the sidebar div fixed the problem, though I did have one bizarre moment when I had to take off one more pixel because what worked on my test server did not work with the same browser when I sent it live.
(By the way, the browser archive at evolt.org is a wonderful resource when you have problems like this.)
I haven’t yet had a chance to check any of the new features of 2.5, so there is likely to be another post in a day or two, but I do know that not having the categories list easily available on the right is a major annoyance right now. I guess I’ll get used to it, but I foresee a lot more posts in which I forget to set any categories.