I’ve just gone through a very quick process of upgrading from WordPress 1.5 to 2.0. So far everything looks good, there doesn’t appear to be any troubles caused by the upgrade, and my custom theme seems to have survived nicely.
The backside seems to be what changed the most. Post entry seems to have been more-or-less simplified. They have integrated some AJAX (or AJAX-like features) in the post authoring page. The way I format the Spurgeon posts may need to change slightly, as the new version doesn’t seem to like the way I format those posts. It also seems not to like double carriage returns between paragraphs in preformatted blockquotes, which has always been my style. I like the look of a blank line between paragraphs. But then, maybe I just need a little more time to figure it out.
I also wish that there was more flexibility and options in formatting. At first glance, I don’t see how to vary the size of text and the font. In the previous version, it was easy to add html tags at will.
Correction, now that I take a better look, it appears that they make it easy to format the posts in the same manner as the previous version, by simply unchecking a box in the user profile. Maybe a useful feature for them to include in a future version would be to switch between rich-text formatting and standard HTML editing on a post-by-post basis.
I love the new preview window. The old one didn’t quite show what the post would look like accurately, but the new shows exactly what the post will look like when published, by showing the actual post page, including the comments box and navigation bar. Pretty cool!
I also see that they now allow the creation of new archive categories from within the post authoring page, another plus. I rarely create new categories any more, but it is nice to not have to save the post, go into another page, create the category, and return to the post authoring page.
Overall, I like the upgrade. I think the new software is worth the trouble, as little as that trouble is. I’ll probably find the feature suggestion page over at WordPress and ask for a HTML vs Rich Text formatting option within the post authoring page, but aside from the absence of that, it is a great package!