I have upgraded bavatuesdays (and six other domains I tend on one WPMu install) to the beta release of WPMu 2.6 in anticipation of upgrading UMW Blogs come August 1st. In fact, the next few weeks are going to be an all out WPMu push. I will be working on updating all our documentation for the new admin interface—I’ll be borrowing liberally from Luke Waltzer’s awesome tutorials getting underway here—as well as making sure the upgrade of UMW Blogs from 1.3.3 to 2.6 is smooth (notice that WPMu has realigned the version numbers with the straight up WordPress). In short, I’ll be doing a lot of looking around for any bugs, especially plugin interference. So, after the seamless upgrade this morning, here’s what I got thus far:
- There were really very few problems upgrading from WPMu 1.5.1 to 2.6 – 1.5.1 deactivates plugins during the install, and re-activates them in all the blogs after the fact. Making the chances for an immediate breaking of the install minimal (this will not be the case going from 1.3.3 to 2.6, however). There was an odd message in the dashboard about this version of WordPress not working with Simple Tags, which doesn’t seem to be the case.
- Also, while writing this I just realized that adding an image from a URL isn’t working properly in the Add Media function for writing a post or page. Moreover, it is missing the music/image/video icons for selecting the appropriate media.
- FeedWordPress, which is an awesome plugin that is allowing for all the inter-blog spamming going on at UMW Blogs, had some serious issues in WPMu 1.5.1 with the new interface and all the AJAX and javascripts, resulting in broken media uploads, inability to arrange widgets, and borked recent comments and incoming links feeds in the dashboard. All those issues go away in WPMu 2.6, but one remains: you can’t open up the Advanced Options sections on the Write Page screen (though they work on the Write Post screen) when FeedWordPress is activated. Odd I know, but true.
- RSS feeds for latest versions of plugins is now a part of WPMu 2.6 (but not Multi-User plugins just yet). I love this feature, it saves me so much time, and as soon as I updated the Bava to 2.6, I got the lastest version of about twelve plugins I let lapse. This is my favorite feature, without question! Although, keep in mind that if a plugin you are using is not distributed through the plugins directory at wordpress.org, you will not get an update for the latest version, which is true in the case of Tan Tan’s Flickr Albums plugin, for example.
- Seems like Gravatar support is now built-in to WPMu 2.6, which is an added bonus!
- Also, there is the Turbo feature in this release that harnesses the power of Google Gears to speed up page loading time. Keep in mind you have to set up Google Gears, but the integration with such a service is interesting. I’m still a bit fuzzy on it, but I’ll be testing it out to see what it is all about.
- What I ‘m most excited about with WPMu 2.6, however, is the WPMu Sitewide Tags Pages plugin by Donncha that will change the way we use tags, tag feeds, and archive posts throughout the environment at UMW Blogs, it’s huge!!! But that will be my next post, I have a bit more testing to do first.
OK, that’s it for now, more soon.
