Upgrading to WordPress 2.5: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
So Yesternight I upgraded to WordPress 2.5, and I wish I could say that things went smoothly, but I can’t, because they didn’t. not entirely.
The Ugly:
See, I ran into a few of problems, some of my own fault, and some not. my main and first problem with my upgrading was the Theme, since the design of my site is based on the Excellent k2 Theme, And for some strange reasons, K2 based themes were getting messed up under WordPress 2.5 on IE.
I knew of this glitch before hand, and since I have Apache and MySQL installed at home and I have a local version of WordPress running on my local machine, I always test things out on my local machine before doing anything on the live website. and Surely enough when I upgraded my local test site to WP 2.5 I noticed that error, It seemed to work fine on FireFox but not IE. and K2 being the complex SOB that it is, I made a decision not to fix my current theme to make it WP 2.5 compatible, but to build a new theme entirely. which took a good amount of time, I’ve tried to make the new theme look as close as possible to the old one, and if you’re a regular reader of Bakkouz.net you will notice the slight difference, or you may not. either way, there are still some small details here and there that need fixing and hopefully they’ll be fixed, but for the major part of it, the theme bit is done and over with and the outcome is satisfactory 
But, alas, I wish that was all. naturally, I had to run into further trouble. I tested out my new theme on my Local installation and everything seems good, but, there was something I missed testing thoroughly, The Plugins. I had not tested all the running plugins on my web site Locally, and after I uploaded the new theme to Bakkouz.net and Upgraded WordPress to 2.5 That is when The real issues starting popping up. Some plugins refused to work under WP 2.5 simply because they were not compatible, some plugins were conflicting with others, and some just gave random fatal errors. it was a mess. I had to look for alternate plugins for the essential ones that I really needed, which thankfully I was able to find. I was able to get most of them up and working again and I was left with a couple of stubborn plugins that just refused to work. So that still needs to be addressed.
The Bad:
After getting the theme and the plugins working for the most part, and being left with some minor tweaks here and there, I decided to look further into WP 2.5 and get a better impression of its working. It would seem that WP 2.5 is somewhat slower than 2.3+ in terms of reacting to changing the settings, logging in into the dashboard and navigation inside the dashboard.
Everything is mixed and shuffled and its an entirely new look which can get a bit confusing at first and needs a little bit of time adjusting to. When I worked with WP for the very first time it took me about 20 seconds to figure out the Write Post page and where everything was and what everything did, on WP 2.5 though, it just doesn’t feel the same, somehow everything looks out of place. for of habit maybe but still I think the older version was more comfortable to with with visually and practically. This is true not only for the Write page, but for everything within the dashboard, since its an entirely new design.
The Good:
The new dashboard is sleek and clean, perhaps a bit too 2.0′ish but thats not too bad. many security problems and bugs were fixed. The color scheme is nice and easy on the eye, and just feels pretty, and hey its always nice to have something new
Important Conclusion:
If you are not in a hurry and don’t feel the need to upgrade, don’t just yet. not until you make sure everything on your current installation will work fine under WP 2.5.
Oh, and If you do notice anything out of order or not working, please do let me know
