I think this blog is back to a working state now after a slightly worrying upgrade process. Those of you who plan to upgrade tp WordPress 2.1 need to be careful. In particular, if you use the Sidebar Widgets feature, you must pay particular attention to the order in which you deactivate your plugins. I’m not exactly sure what I did, but I usually run about a dozen plugins, and halfway through the process of deactivation the WordPress dashboard stopped working. Oops. I worked around the problem by going into the httpdocs/wp-content directory and renaming plugins as Xplugins. Then I unpacked the new distribution, which overwrote the existing WP files and created a new plugins directory. (WP 2.1 ships with a new version of the Akismet spam-blocker.) Next I ran the upgrade script, activated Akismet, and verified that baseline operation was correct. Only then did I restore my old plugins from Xplugins to plugins, activating and testing each one. I didn’t restore those plugins that I wasn’t planning to use. (Before I began the upgrade, I printed out the Plugins dashboard page, so that I could see exactly which plugins were in use.)
The only other oddity was that I had previously organized my blogroll using a set of pseudo-categories that didn’t show up in the category list. Somehow the upgrade process merged these pseudo-categories into my main category list. I took the opportunity to recategorize my blogroll, and everything looks OK. I decided not to reactivate a few features that weren’t much used by my readers – things like registering for comment notification. Let me know if you run into any problems.
There are some nice features in the new release. The one that is most immediately obvious to me (as a Mac user) is that the HTML formatting controls which used to work only in Firefox now appear in Safari. Comment and post management is also substantially improved.
UPDATE: One last warning. If you use the “bookmarklet” technique [a fragment of Javascript invoked via a browser bookmark] to blog from your web browser, you’ll need to replace your old script with a new one. Delete the old one from your bookmark bar, then log in to the dashboard, choose Write, and scroll down. Then just follow the instructions.