MadeMistakes
Migrated the site over to Wordpress 2.5 without any hiccups this morning. Everything looks good and works as expected so I’m happy about that. I have a few things to cleanup (like my tags and image.php template), but for the most part I’m ready to roll. Looks like the fixed the gallery feature too because I was having some problems with that in RC1 and RC2. Yes!
Just installed Wordpress 2.5-RC2 onto a test server to check compatibility with my theme and plugins and everything is still AOK. Played with the image uploader some and am really digging the new gallery feature. Going to make my life so much easier when I want to post additional images on a post. Previously I had to create thumbnails and link up everything with some custom HTML…now Wordpress can do all that for me in a fraction of the time. It even lets you add more meta information to each photo; stuff like titles, captions, descriptions, etc.
Yes!
After reading the sneak peek post on the next release of Wordpress, I decided to download the 2.5 Release Candidate to see what it would break on my site.
For the most part everything works as it should. What did break was anything related to the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin I had installed. Part of the reason I held off upgrading to 2.3 was Wordpress’s decision to support tagging and didn’t want to deal with migrating over. Since there were no other compelling features I left well enough alone and stayed with version 2.2.3. Now with all the goodies coming with 2.5 I’m feeling the urge to update. So I decided to try a local install on my computer, import my database and templates, and see if I could get tagging up in running with Wordpress instead of UTW.
It looks like UTW still functions properly but if you want WP to manage your tags you have to do an import. Luckily WP makes that super simple. Just go to Manage…Import…and pick the Ultimate Tag Warrior import option. Guides you through 5 simple steps and all of your tags are now in WP’s world. I’ll have to eventually clean them up since it added a bunch of hyphens to my tags, but that shouldn’t be that big of a deal.
With that part out of the way, the tricky stuff was next…what do I have to change in my templates to get tags to show up in my posts? Didn’t take much more than one php line in the single.php template, but familiarizing myself with templates I altered a year ago took a bit longer. Deactivating the UTW plugin had the negative side-effect of killing my related posts list after each posts so I had to install the Similiar Posts plugin to remedy that. An added bonus is it’s 2.5 compatible…yay!
The only other tag related things I had to fix were the tag cloud on the homepage (removed the UTW tag cloud code and turned on a widget. easy!) and add a line of php in my tag archive template.
With those tagging issues taken care of I decided to dig around and see what changed and what was new with 2.5. Some of the things that I think are great improvements are:
I’m really tempted to install 2.5-RC1 onto my live site and start working with it more, but I probably should wait until the official version drops. Which by the sounds of it could be any day now. I can’t wait!
The design section of my portfolio really needs to be refreshed and updated to reflect current work. Most of the stuff in there now is old old old student work from 8 years ago. Yuck! I’ve also been investigating custom fields in Wordpress so I can get the homepage and portfolio section looking more visual. My intention was to have smaller thumbnails so you can see more of the work at a glance, instead of the huge teaser image and then body copy. I’m sure it’s possible I just need time to wrap my head around it. Was able to do it in Movable Type but it was a pain updating…
After three years I’ve finally dumped Movabletype and shifted everything over to Wordpress. I got the basic site form of my site up by importing old MT database into WP and restyling some things. Surprisingly it all went fairly smooth. What’s left for me to do:
I’m sure I’m forgetting some other stuff but it’s time to watch a movie. I can’t sit in front of this computer anymore.
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