I upgraded the blog this morning to Wordpress 2.0 — luckily, everything went off without a hitch and there were no major fires. Even more surprising was that all of my plugins still worked. With the new upgrade comes better spam-prevention features, a shiny new admin console and a few other changes. But there's still some things that need a little work.

PROS

• ADMIN CONSOLE: The new blue shades of the admin console make this upgrade a nice touch from the monochromatic greys of former Wordpress editions.
• POST CREATION PAGE: By default, the new "Write Post" page has a WYSIWYG editor with many common word processing features, such as the ability to bold, italicize and hyperlink text. The file upload dialogue has been freed from a separate admin page and placed under the text area used for composing entries. Perhaps the nicest edition in this section are the drag-and-drop collapsible modules for common post features, such as categories, password protection, and others. Also, once you compose a post and click "Save and Continue Editing", the preview of the entry actually shows how it will look on your blog's design. Very good for those authors looking to preserve some real-estate on their site.
• AKISMET: Wordpress ups the ante for other blogging platforms with the integration of Akismet, a "spam clearinghouse", if you will, which checks submitted comments against their own blacklist to determine if they're good or garbage. Implementation requires a Wordpress.com API, but they're easy to obtain. Just head on over to Wordpress.com and pick one up.
• THEME EDITOR: For themes which have been developed specifically for Wordpress 2.0 (such as Regulus), global options which allow you to change aspects of your blog like header graphics and link colors. It should be exciting to see the ways this will be used in the future.
• IMPORT: Before Wordpress 2.0, you'd have to rely on weeding through the Wordpress user manual to find out how to import your posts from Blogger or Movable Type, but now there's a specific section of the Admin console which allows you to import from an RSS feed, a Textpattern blog or a site from Blogger.

So all in all, a good improvement. But there are some things about the new Wordpress 2.0 which could use some work (and will hopefully get considered for future versions — keep in mind a lot of these are personal idiosyncracies):

CONS

• DASHBOARD CUSTOMIZATION: Don't get me wrong — I like how the Dashboard shows the latest comments and Technorati mentions of your blog. That's very cool. But the information from the Wordpress Development Blog and Planet Wordpress? Gotta go. Sure, I know there are great things going on in the Wordpress universe, but when you start posting stuff like "OMG check out this cool meme LOL!!1!" or "Happy Birthday Random Stranger", then I stop checking the Dashboard. There should be a way to easily change what those feeds are without doing a lot of code diving. No matter — I'll post how to change those feeds and turn your Dashboard into a low-level aggregator so you can get more mileage out of it.

  Get it? Mileage? Dashboard? Eh….

• FILE MANAGEMENT: Unless you know exactly where the file is you need to edit, you're screwed. In WP's defense, it does say that the online editor is only meant to be used when you don't have access to a text editor or FTP client. Fair enough. But it's still not intuitive enough for Johnny Moron who goes tinkering around in a fresh WP install.
• CURLY QUOTES AND THE LIKE: Call me old school, but I despise the sight of curly quotes and ellipses. Wordpress does this by default, and I hate it. It's a bitch in the event you do a copy and paste job from another editor (like Word…*shudder*) and then when you go to post, your quotes look like gibberish and your XML feed is suddenly invalid. There should really be an option under Options -> Writing to change that automatically; instead, you must do some code diving.
  

  HOW TO CHANGE YOUR CURLY QUOTES AND STUFF BACK TO THEIR NORMAL CHARACTERS

  1. Navigate to your Wordpress admin console (Example: http://www.example.net/wp-admin.php).
  2. Click on "Manage" in your Admin navigation menu, then click on "Files" in the Admin navigation submenu.
  3. In the "Other Files" section on this page, type in "wp-includes/default-filters.php" without the quotation marks and click on "Edit Files".
  4. Comment out all lines that have "wptexturize" in it. They follow the order "add_filter ('the_EXAMPLE', 'wptexturize');"
  5. Oh…you don't know how to comment it out. Just add two forward slashes and a space before each line (// ) and save the file.

  Now that should correct the problem, but they're still showing up on this WP 2.0 blog. Gah.

• EXPORT: I'm sorry, but the fact that Wordpress 2.0 doesn't have a native export function is sad. If I start some shit on MT, Blogger, Textpattern, or even Greymatter (do people still use that?), I can export my entries if I decided to switch. But Wordpress? No sir. Once you're in…you're in. Sure, you can implement a plugin script to export to MT, but it's not a native feature. Sure, you can export your database file, but does the average user know how to do this? Probably not. They might know their PHPMyAdmin from a hole in the ground.

But even with all that said…go and download it and give it a try. If you're currently running WP, upgrade for the new spam prevention features — they're quite lovely. Go for it!