Back to the future
I originally upgraded to WordPress 2.0 on January 5th. I immediately noticed the differences and chocked my initial negative feelings up to it just being a radical redesign and tried to give myself time to adjust. Over the course of the month I spent more time squashing bugs, hacking things to work the way I wanted them to and generally disabling the whiz-bang flashy elements that glossed over the real usability than I did doing any real writing. By late January I gave up and took a week off. Around February 5th I noticed 2.0.1 had been released and chose to upgrade again hoping things would be fixed. Thankfully the upgrade from 2.0 to 2.0.1 is only 5 steps instead of 13 yet still no automated upgrade script.
The supposed list of fixes and improvements was impressive on paper, but in my tests still completely non-existent. Everything went back to not working, plugins broke, I spend four days after upgrading to 2.0.1 retooling my css which somehow didn’t want to play nice with the new version. I realized comments were acting screwy, the new inline upload function simply didn’t work and my asides were broken. After fixing as much as I could I realized my page went back to not validating, this time with an amazing 126 errors.
That was the last straw. I dumped the entire mysql database for my site, backed it all up and set to downgrading. My sentiments on WP2 are in no means a minority opinion. Most evident in the fact that there’s a WordPress downgrade script. The only problem was that it works from 2.0 -> 1.5.2. My upgrade to 2.0.1 essentially screwed me. I hacked the existing one to get most of the job done, but eventually had to resort to adding the last couple of posts and all of the comments back into the downgraded database by hand to make sure it went properly.
So two months of free time wasted trying to get this crap to work right only to be forced to give up and downgrade to a perfectly working version. All I can say is after this crap 2.1 had better work spectacularly or else WordPress could find it’s user base swiftly dwindling.