WordPress 3.0 is out. Should you upgrade?

If you don’t selfhost your blog, skip this post. It talks about a common problem all of us, selfhosters have. But if you don’t selfhost, you’re immune to this disease, which has as symptoms:

• anxiety attacks,
• dizzy spells,
• recurring nightmares,
• adversity to “check for upgrades” or even “admin menus” buttons,
• and above all: fierce regret to ever have gotten to this stage where you are considered a “webmaster”, but deep down inside you realize you know shit, and that big “Internet Publishing” monster is far bigger and more powerful than you will ever be.

But as you are here, welcome. Welcome into this safe space. This is the selfhosters’ cocoon. You don’t have to click any critical upgrade buttons here. You are safe here… Everything will be OK! (soft music playing in the background, a bunny-dressed waitress brings you your favourite drink,..)

<pink off> Where were we? Oh, right, back to the post. We were talking about dreaded upgrades…

Do you have that feeling too? Do you stare at the “Upgrade available – Click here” prompt… For your laptop software, your iPhone applications, you know what that might mean: “Heaven or Hell”… Either you get additional functionality, or “The World As You Know It” will crash. For the former, you’re cool until the next week when more upgrades are available. In case of the latter, you’ll be busy downgrading, retrofitting, restoring backups and patching for the rest of the night.

Upgrading your iPhone and laptop is one thing, but upgrading your blog, is another. If you fail, you can’t keep it private. When you website crashes, it is there for the world to know. You’re then just waiting for the first tweet from one of your visitors:

"www.yoursite.com is down again. Daaah. #FAIL"

But still, you know, to be “part of the bunch”, you really should click that button, and upgrade. Although, for myself, I have to admit, half of the time I don’t really know why I should upgrade. Hardly any of the upgrades give me additional functionality I have really been waiting for. When reading through the upgrade notes, I rarely come across anything I need, or even understand. Know that feeling?
And yet the feeling of “I have to execute that upgrade”, is compulsive. I don’t really know why. Probably because I don’t want to be left out. Because it somewhere guarantees that my plugins remain compatible one to another. Or it might solve a bug I have not come across yet. Or I don’t want to skip upgrades for several months, only to realize half a year down the line none of my plugins are compatible anymore with a really needed upgrade, a security patch for instance. And we all know what a drag it is to go through six months of delayed upgrades, and how all the possible conflicts would then be condensed into one major upgrade, increasing your chance of:

"www.yoursite.com is down again. Daaah. #FAIL"

I have about 10 selfhosted sites. Most on WordPress and Drupal. I use plugins (or modules in Drupal) sparingly, and restrict myself only to those I really need. Here on BlogTips, I have 15 of them. A pretty average number I have across all of my blogs. On most sites I actually use the same plugins. Even so, I get about two to five upgrade notifications per week. Per week…. Two to five chances to wake up in hell.

Sure enough, just like any conscientious blogger, I have a test site where I try out the upgrades first. (You have one too, right? Right????) If my testblog survives the plugin upgrade, I do the upgrades on my life blogs. But it is a drag. It is something as a blogger, I don’t look forward to. I want to concentrate on writing content, not on dealing with all of that “webmaster” stuff…

Then comes the time, where the ultimate nightmare comes. A major upgrade of your blogsoftware is released. Like this weekend’s WordPress 3.0 release.
Don’t get me wrong, I love WordPress. I think it is -hands down- the best blogging software around. I love the idea such a piece of quality software is put in the public domain, free for all to use. I love the idea that hundreds of software developpers all over the world contribute to it. I love the user forums and support infrastructure. I also love that, compared to any software, the bugs are few and the functionality is great.

WordPress 3.0 will for sure give me additional functionality. Some of it, I want. Some of it, I could not care less about.

• It has a new default theme, called Twenty Ten. – Mmm, don’t use the default themes.
• Theme developers get new APIs to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus, post types, and taxonomies. – Thankyouverymuch, but I am not a theme developer
• MU and WordPress have now merged into one product, allowing you to create multiple blogs with one installation – Which I don’t need. Not at this moment anyway.
• Contextual help on every admin screen — Nice, but I hardly ever use the help screens.
• Proper menus – Ah something I really looked forward to. But you can only use it, if your theme supports menus. Some of mine don’t. But I have to admit, this, together with the taxonomy feature would make WordPress move closer into the functionality of a proper CMS (Content Management System), which is something I firmly believe in…
• Bulk updates so you can upgrade your theme, your 15 plugins and WordPress all with a single click – Something I don’t use, as I want to upgrade them one by one, just in case anything goes wrong.
• 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements – Oh dear, that many bugs?

Again, don’t get me wrong. Let me restate it clearly: I <heart> WordPress. And watching their release video, I can be nothing but enthusiastic about the work the team does:

But then again, my heart beats faster when I look at that dreaded “Upgrade Now” button. “To upgrade or not the upgrade”, that is the question.

As you know, on BlogTips I mostly write about stuff I am confronted with, as an average Joe Blogger. And stuff people ask me. So the question is indeed, upgrade or not? Well the first thing I did, is go to the WordPress support forums, and look at the upgrade problems people are faced with. While the WordPress 3.0 forum seems to be closed, most of the issues seem to be in the Installation forum. Browsing through the topics I see:

• There are some issues with hosting services:
  

  just finished chatting with Hostgator support and they’ve told me everyone is having issues installing wp3 – so they don’t recommend it for now.

• There are some issues with the memory size on hosting services, where 32 Mb does not seem to be sufficient. The work around by changing the memory limit in the php.ini and wp-config.php file seem to work around that, but I really can not remember what the memory limit is for the hosting service I use. And of course a search on Godaddy for “memory limit Linux hosting” returns ziltch.
• Some plugins are clearly not compatible, or are conflicting with WP 3.0. Some themes might have problems.
• And of course the worse of the worse, the blogmaster’s nightmare:
  

  I tried to upgrade to WordPress 3.0 today. I did an automatic update, told me it was successful. Then I tried to go to another page in the dashboard and it gave me an error message.

Given the fact there are 10 million installations of WordPress in the world, I am sure there will be some issues popping up. We live in an imperfect world. The more as the quality control of plugins and themes is really left to the individual developpers. But, browsing through the forum, there does not seem to be a general ” #FAIL ” outcry. That is positive.

So what to do next? I quietly upgraded one of my test blogs. And..

…it worked fine. The new functionality was there (apart from the fact that my theme did not support menus). Writing and publishing new posts seemed to work. None of my plugins puffed out, and all seems to be happy-happy. So what was all the fuzz about? Were my fears really unfounded?

What to do next? Well, I will sit on my hands, and wait. I will weather the storm for a while. There are those who love to sail in fierce winds, but I am not that kind of sailor. I take the safe route. I will wait for a while, keep my ship at bay, and see what the others come up with. And wait for some inevitable bug fixes. That is what I am going to do.

And I will live with the fact that for the next couple of weeks, I will dream of only one thing:

Update August 10 2010:
Since publishing this post, I have successfully upgraded all my blogs to WordPress 3.0, including one rather unconventional RSS based site. I had no problems thus far. Well done, WordPress. You have my vote of confidence!

Tagged as: hosting, tips, WordPress