Upgrading to WordPress 2.5 

I figured I'd log what I did when I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5.

First, I disabled some plugins I figured I wouldn't necessarily need post-upgrade. The two I disabled were Kramer, which grabs Technorati links back to the blog (newly built into the WordPress dashboard) and SpotMilk, a customized dashboard (which I wasn't even sure would work).

Then I upgraded.

So far, so good.

Poking around the settings, I decided to turn on the global Gravatar usage, rather than using the Gravatar plugin. That's a great idea, except my theme doesn't come with Gravatar support, so I'll need to use the built in functions.

Then my MacBook crashed for the second time today (I think it's Twitterrific, but we'll see). Awesomely, MarsEdit earned its keep by having autosaved my work. So back to it.

After poking around, I got the built-in functionality to work, but since it returns an entire image tag, and not just the URL to the avatar image, it's actually less useful to me than the plugin is. I turned the plugin back on. Good enough.

Next, I noticed the Mowser plugin had a new version. Perfect chance to try the new built-in plugin updating. Clicked the link and that was pretty much it -- the plugin was up-to-date. Nifty. You can see the Mowser-fied version of my site here. Not perfect, but pretty good work from a one ... two person company.

Took this as the opportunity to clean up my plugins page. Gone are the aforementioned Kramer and SpotMilk, along with the Hello Dolly and WP-flv plugin I'd installed a while ago.

Now, I wanted to turn some of my hard-coded plugin links into widget usage, to make switching themes easier. I started adding widgets to my left sidebar, expecting that I'd need to go disable them in the code. Nope! Nice, it must use a different bit of sidebar code when you use widgets. Very cool. This allows me to dump a couple more plugins (MyNetflix and a Last.fm one).

Also, turn off WP-Cache when you're testing, or you'll be annoyed out of your mind.

One missing widget: I was previously using the Google Shared Items widget, but now I'll just use the RSS feed for it. Let's see how that looks ... ugly. But, good enough for now. Maybe there's a WordPress widget for it. Wow, I'm digging the widgets. They make my life a whole lot easier. I should have tried this a long time ago. Even added a little About Me text widget.

Turning WP-Cache back on.

Finally, testing to see if MarsEdit can still post ... huzzah! Success. And with that, I'm done.