Denis de Benardy (the creator of the Semiologic Pro theme and many of the amazing WordPress plug-ins used here on How To Blog) sent off the following warning to his mailing list and kindly allowed me to quote him here:

Hello all,

I’m getting a rather large number of emails related to WordPress 2.1, so I figured I’d send this short notice.

Subtle yet very real changes occurred in the Database schema. Anything that relies on a post’s status (page/post, draft/published), in particular, is subject to hard to spot bugs. e.g. post lists, comment lists, etc.

A couple of options also disappeared with almost zero notice. Plugins that rely on them (and many do) will invariably be broken. Again, this may or may not occur with obvious bugs.

In the end, do NOT upgrade WP 2.1 immediately! There is no rush, as in security issues in need of fixing. And this update can potentially break many blogs if not dealt with properly.

A Semiologic Pro update with WordPress 2.1 will occur next week or so. But not before I feel things are stable enough for a proper release.

Thanks for reading!

Denis

He gives good advice…

I know that I promised to test out the process of upgrading an existing WordPress installation from 1.5.x to 2.0, but until 2.0 has resolved some of the existing bugs (and the resulting slew of additional minor point release upgrades have been completed, forcing users to upgrade to 2.0.1, and then 2.0.2 possibly days later, etc - (remember what happened after 1.5?)) I’m holding off.

As mentioned before, I’ve done a clean install of WordPress 2.0, and while I’ve been told that much has been done in the underlying code base to provide for the possibility of future themes and plugins that are more spectacular than ever, those themes and plugins don’t exist yet, WP 2.0 itself is still way too buggy, and from an end-user perspective I just don’t see that much that’s new and exciting to compell anyone to want to upgrade.

Yeah, the new user interface is prettier. And it’s nice to have a built-in WYSIWYG plugin, but that too is quirky and WYSIWYG plugin options already existed for 1.5.x users who wanted them. The built-in spam plugin of Akismet is pretty darn cool, BUT it requires you to register at WordPress.com in order to get an API key to use it, and apparently if you use it too much you’ll be required to get a commercial license for it (and there’s some talk about the ethics of packaging a somewhat commercial product like Akismet with an opensource free product like WordPress). Not to mention the fact that there were already some pretty amazing spam fighting plugins available for WordPress 1.5.x that now don’t work properly in WordPress 2.0 (like SpamKarma2, for example). The purported benefit of Akismet over plugins such as SpamKarma2 is that it is always 100% up-to-date and never requires any upgrades.

I’ve no doubt that, eventually (and hopefully sooner rather than later), the bugginess of WordPress 2.0 will be resolved, and some amazing 2.0 specific themes and plugins will start to appear that will tantalize us to make the switch. But until then, I’m staying put.

Update: I’ve ported How to Blog to WordPress 2.0.1 and am thrilled to have done so! (Although the process of changing blog platforms and URLs is a nightmare of tedious endless little annoying tasks) Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds to reflect the new, permanent location at http://www.emilyrobbins.com/how-to-blog/

In preparation for doing my first upgrade of an existing WP 1.5 site, I did some research first to try to ensure the process went as smoothly as possible (when I begin it – which I still haven’t gotten to yet). I almost cringe in writing this, because I truly love WordPress and everything the team has done to provide such a wonderful free blogging tool for all of us. But the truth is that I came across a number of posts hi-lighting problems people have already discovered in 2.0 and/or reasons why they don’t feel upgrading to 2.0 is worth bothering, and I’d be remiss in not reporting that.

I know that those of us who want to be on the bleeding edge will disregard all of this and upgrade to 2.0 because it’s cool and simply to have the latest (if not the greatest – although that remains to be seen) version. But for those fence-sitters, here’s some added info you might want to have in making your decision as to whether or not to upgrade your working version of WordPress 1.5.2 that you’ve been happily using to the new WordPress 2.0.

Here are some reports of problems with WordPress 2.0:

• Something Unpredictable has an article entitled, “What’s Already Broke in 2.0”
• Ryan Duff writes about how and why he downgraded from WordPress 2.0 back to WordPress 1.5
• 24fc wrote a detailed diatribe about why he’s “mightily disappointed” in WordPress 2.0 (including problems with trackbacks and permalinks) over in the support forums
• Brendan details problems he encountered in trying to upgrade to WordPress 2.0, (although he now seems to have made some progress in the upgrade, and is actually working on creating a WP 2.0 Theme) summarizing that:
  

  “If you use WordPress as standard, the upgrade should, more or less work. If you use cat2tag, ultimate tag warrior or deviate away even just a smidgen from the standard install (and lets face it, an increasingly large base of the WordPress community does) - then expect things to break.. badly.

  In my case the upgrade took a horrible toll on the database - the new WP db version is not backwards compatible - if you take the ‘upgrade’ path, perform a backup first or the results will be, well, unpleasant.”

And then there are others who have documented why they’re not upgrading:

• WordPress 2.0… Who Cares?, which provides an extremely detailed feature by feature list of why TheBisch hasn’t found a compelling enough reason to upgrade. In sum – he doesn’t think the new features are ‘all that’. He also points out that a lot of what’s new in WP2.0 pertains to code in the back-end which is designed to make things worlds easier for WP developers (those folks who create all the wonderful plug-ins we all can’t live without, as well as those who make the themes and templates which then personify our blogs). That’s great for developers, but for those who are blogging it doesn’t do them a spec of good JUST YET. First the developers need to use all those fabulous new hooks, etc to create plug-ins and themes which are compatible with v2.0, and that’s gonna take some time (even if it is easier for them to do than in v1.5). But it does mean that down the road we can expect newer and greater plug-ins with features we might never have even imagined possible – we just have to give the developers time to do their genius stuff. And in TheBisch’s mind, until that happens and bugs are hammered out, he doesn’t see a reason to bother with the upgrade.
• Phu Ly, an accomplished WP 1.5 Theme(Gentle Calm, Flex, Gespaa..) and Plug-in author writes Why If..Else has not been upgraded to WP 2.0
• Tamba2, who actually wrote one of the upgrade guides, is actually NOT upgrading himself and posts his reasoning here

If you’re not upgrading, Asymptomatic would like to know why not, and asks that you comment on his post to provide your own reasons for the choice not to upgrade (or upgrade problems that you’ve personally encountered) – to date, there are 106 responses to that post and many of them are rather informative — I’d highly recommend anyone considering upgrading give this post and it’s comments a good read.

In a response to a post by Phu Ly, Asymptomatic wrote the following giving his take on all the comments on his post regarding upgrading to 2.0

“It’s certainly not for everyone.

To generalize on most of the answers I’ve read so far, the response is one of:

1) I’m not upgrading because my favorite plugin/theme doesn’t work.

2) I’m not upgrading because there is no benefit to me over what I have

3) I’m not upgrading because of flaws in the development/testing/release process for which I’ll wait for patches.

Any of these could also factor heavily into one’s decision to upgrade some blogs and not others.”

All in all, there have been a lot of people saying there’s just too much work and too many chances of problems incurring, coupled with too little incentive for them to do the upgrade. However, many of these same folk have said that they would use WordPress 2.0 if they were doing a fresh install for new blog.

As for me, I feel I owe it to the WP team, as well as to all of my blog readers to perform an upgrade on at least one of my WP 1.5 blogs so that I can report back what my own experiences with it were and whether I’d choose to do it again on other blogs. And I *will* do this. However, given the reports of time consuming problems that could be encountered, and that I’m super short on time b/c I’m crazy behind in my work that pays the bills, it could be a few days or even longer before I can tackle this project.