guff

Upgrade, update, up the ante

I was up very late last night—or very early this morning, depending on how you look at it—and decided it a good time to upgrade guff to WordPress 1.5. Turned out to be a bad move on my part. Not the actual upgrade, which went as smooth as I could have expected. It was the time taken in preparation that was more than I anticipated, in part due to my serious inability to paint inside the technical lines. A number of changes were required to both my stuff and the WordPress source before everything started playing nice together (thank the Illuminati for test sites!).

It wouldn’t have been as rough if there hadn’t been so many big changes to WordPress under the hood. The jump in version numbering from .2 to .5 was an appropriate one. A few unexpected gotchas were even thrown in the past few weeks, and at least one mod I thought would work required further rethinking and tinkering. I still ended up having to turn a few of my custom tweaks off; trust me, you won’t miss them. If anything, I now know a little more about how WP 1.5 is put together, so I’ll mark this as an educational experience.

I also wanted to move guff’s design and layout into the new Themes feature. That was easy, but only because the test site allowed me to play around with it for some time. I also took the opportunity to slip in some small changes to the look and feel, the primary one being the loss of monthly archive links on the sidebar. I’ll be adding non-post sections to guff soon; a more formal archive page is one.

Anyway, for me there was no upgrade revelry, but 1.5 is up and running after only a modicum of swearing and shouting at the monitor. Thankfully, WordPress never takes it personally.