W-Shadow.com

I’m sure you know why I write this. A new version of WordPress is out, and I’ve upgraded this blog immediately. So here are the mandatory first impressions (nope, I don’t use SVN betas). Just conforming with the unquestionable avalanche of review-style posts that have appeared, with more no doubt being written right now.

Right after the upgrade I got logged out and couldn’t log in again no matter what browser I tried (all plugins deactivated). Eventually I tried deleting cookies and that worked. Maybe the improved cookie security in WP 2.6 still needs a bit of debugging?

Bulk handling of plugins is very useful, especially just after an upgrade when everything is deactivated. Theoretically the plugin I used for upgrading WP – WordPress Automatic Upgrade – should have took care of that but it glitched out exactly on this step, so I had to reactivate plugins manually. Luckily this only took one step with the new system, not thirty six steps, as it would if reactivating each of my plugins one by one.

I’m still undecided about the new design of the Plugins page that places active, inactive and recently active plugins in separate sections. On one hand additional structure is helpful in general, for a “birds-eye” view. On the other hand it makes it harder to find one specific plugin because you have to look through all three lists, not just one alphabetized table. You also need to scroll more to find plugins that have updates pending (unless you have my Updater plugin which has an “Upgrade All” button, hint hint 😉 ).

Most of the plugins I’ve written seem to be working more or less okay with the new version. I’ll upload new versions of One Click Plugin Updater and Broken Link Checker soon – just a few minor fixes to deal with some cosmetic issues + a version compatibility bump. I’ve already uploaded a new version of Safer Cookies to make it fully WP 2.6 compatible.

Google Gears… Ah, I’d love to try out this feature, but it turns out it works neither with Opera 9.51 (shame, shame! I say) nor the Firefox 3.1 beta. I even hacked the Gears addon to make FF think it will work with the beta version, but even though it shows up as available now it still doesn’t function. I loathe the idea of starting up ye old ‘n buggy Internet Explorer 7 just to try out one feature, but I feel the temptation growing strong.

Ah, what the hell, it couldn’t be that bad…

… Wait, WTF is this? 404?… arrgh *crackle* *silence*