WordPress 2.5 was released a couple of days ago so I’ve been updating my own WordPress installations (have over 50 of them) to version 2.5 and testing the WordPress AdSense/SEO themes available to buy on this site to make sure there are no issues.
Looks like they have made no major changes to the template system in WordPress 2.5 since all my 2.3 compatible AdSense/SEO themes are also WordPress 2.5 compatible, so anyone who has bought a theme from this site and kept up to date with the free updates I email out whenever I do an update should have no major problems when updating to WordPress 2.5.
Upgrade WordPress 2.3 to WordPress 2.5
There’s a small change to the wp-config.php file. Looks like they have added a secret question option for your WordPress admin password (don’t know how this works yet). I’ve updated sites to 2.5 without including this info and they work fine, if you want to add it load their sample file wp-config-sample.php into a text editor and you’ll see this-
Either add your database info into this sample WordPress config file and save as wp-config.php (include a unique secret question) and FTP over your current wp-config.php file;
or copy this text to your current wp-config.php file and FTP to your site (I find this option easier with over 50 WordPress sites).
// Change SECRET_KEY to a unique phrase. You won't have to remember it later,
// so make it long and complicated. You can visit https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm
// to get a phrase generated for you, or just make something up.
define('SECRET_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here'); // Change this to a unique phrase.
After updating your files to WordPress 2.5 login to your dashboard and you’ll be presented with a database update page.
Follow the instructions to complete the database upgrade-
If you’ve upgraded from WordPress 2.3 (like I have) everything should work as before theme wise (at least that is the case with my AdSense/SEO themes). I’m sure there will be themes and plugins out there that will experience problems, so look to your plugin/theme creator and hope for an update.
This brings us to the new WordPress 2.5 look which is very clean (I like it).
New WordPress 2.5 User Features
Edited from WordPress.org info
Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard concentrating on what’s most important in the dashboard and organize things to allow you to focus on what’s important — your blog.
Dashboard Widgets — the dashboard is now a series of widgets, including ones to show you fun stats about your posting, latest comments, people linking to you, new and popular plugins, and WordPress news. Customize any of the dashboard widgets to show, for example, news from your local paper instead of WP news. Plugins can also hook in, for example the WordPress.com stats widget adds a handy double-wide stats box.
Multi-file upload with progress bar — before uploading a large file would take forever, never knowing how far along it was and multi file upload wasn’t possible. Now you can select a whole folder of images, music, videos etc… at once and it’ll show you the progress of each upload.
Bonus: EXIF extraction — if you upload JPEG files with EXIF metadata like camera make and model, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, et al. WordPress will extract all the data into custom fields you can use in your template. If you use the EXIF title fields or similar those will be put into their equivalent fields in WP. Most modern digital cameras generate EXIF data. (this sounds a cool feature).
Search posts and pages — search used to cover just posts, now it includes pages too, a great boon for thoe using WordPress as a CMS. New themes can style or sort pages differently in results. This is particularly useful to people like me as I use WordPress as a general CMS as wll as for blogs.
Tag management — you can now add, rename, delete, and do whatever else you like to tags from inside WordPress, no plugins needed. Not new to 2.5, that was new in 2.3.
Password strength meter — when you change your password on your profile it’ll tell you how strong your password is to help you pick a good one.
Concurrent editing protection — for those of you on multi-author blogs, have you ever opened a post while someone was already editing it, and your auto-saves kept overwriting each other, irrecoverably losing hours of work? I bet that added a few words to your vocabulary. Now if you open a post that someone else is editing, WordPress magically locks it and prevents you from saving until the other person is done. You’ll see a message warning the file is currently being edited by user X.
Few-click plugin upgrades — if the plugins you use are part of the plugin directory since 2.3 we’ve told you when they have an update available. Now we take that to the next logical step — downloading and installing the upgrade for you. This is dependent a little bit on your host setup, and it may ask you for your FTP password much like OS X or Windows will ask you for a password, but it works well on majority of hosts we were able to test, your mileage may very, plugins in mirror may be larger than they appear. This is a useful feature, causes me a problem though as I edit my plugins for SEO reasons and make them available on the site.
Friendlier visual post editor — I’m not sure how to articulate this improvement except to say “it doesn’t mess with your code anymore.” We’re now using version 3.0 of TinyMCE, which means better compatibility with Safari, and we’ve paid particular attention this release to its integration and interaction with complex HTML. It also now has a “no-distractions” mode which is like Writeroom for your browser. I’ve never liked WordPress visual editor (it sucked) and would always turn it off. We will see how much of an improvement this is.
Built-in galleries — when you take advantage of multi-file upload to upload a bunch of photos, we have a new shortcode that lets you to easily embed galleries by just putting [ gallery] (without the space) in your post. It’ll display all your thumbnails and captions and each will link each to a page where people can comment on the individual photos. I’ve been using this feature on my blog and have already uploaded over 1,200 pictures into 23 galleries. The shortcode has some hidden options too, check out this documentation. This sounds interesting, my wife runs a picture blog sounds like this could make her life a lot easier.
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1 responses to Upgrade WordPress 2.3 to WordPress 2.5
Thank you very much for the article.
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