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/