Cynics Unlimited

Wordpress 2.1 is out, just days after a bugfix/maintenance release. The feature list is impressive –

• Autosave
• Tabbed editor for seamless switching between WYSIWYG and code editing
• Lossless XML import and export (about time! Brilliant!)
• Spell Checking (eh … not so important if you have Firefox 2)
• Blog privacy – avoid being searched by google
• Any page can be front page
• More efficient database code (a god-send for high traffic websites … this blog unfortunately not being among them)
• Draft/Private settings for pages
• Upload manager
• Updated Akismet

It appears Wordpress is not only making sure it keeps up or stays ahead of competing blog software but it also seems to be taking aim at power-bloggers who been lured away by portal software such as Joomla and Drupal. While still short of being full-on portal, Wordpress is definitely starting to take on the appearance professional website creation software.

This time I’m going to be a “first adopter” rather than waiting for other bloggers to trip over the bugs. Information on compatibility with selected plugins will be provided as it becomes available, and if all goes well the upgrade will be rolled out to the other sites under my hosting plan.

Plugin Compatibility Report (to be constantly updated):

• BDP RSS Aggregator 0.4.10 – (Jan 23) No apparent issues – as you can see, the news headlines on the right hand side are still updating.
• Subscribe to Comments 2.0.8 – (Jan 23) Displays alright. Maybe a subscriber can weight in on functionality?
• Wordpress Database Backup 1.8 – (Jan 23) Ran a manual database bckup
• Adhesive 3.2 – (Jan 23) This post is stuck to the top of the front page for now.
• Digg This 1.0.1 – (Jan 23) Trying this one for the first time …
• Spam Karma 2.2r3 – (Jan 23) If this doesn’t work, I’m rolling back to v2.06!
• Ultimate Tag Warrior 2.9.2.1 – (Jan 23) No longer 100% vital to web traffic but a “nice to have”. In the admin display, the input text field overlaps right wide bar.
• Google Sitemaps 3.0b1 – (Jan 23) Again, incompatibility might inspire a downgrade!