Although WordPress 2.3 came out nearly a week ago, I decided to wait to upgrade it until this weekend, at a time when the kids were out of the house. After nearly 10 months as a WordPress user, I’ve learned that it’s best to pick a quiet block of time when I know that I will be able to finish what I start.

This was the easiest upgrade yet.

One thing that always bothered me about switching from the static MovableType to the dynamic WordPress was that the upgrade process couldn’t happen in the background. If a bad upgrade in MovableType made the admin interface inaccessible, the static HTML files were still there keeping the blog up for the world. Now the WordPress installation instructions point to the Maintenance Mode plugin as a suggestion, which replaces your blog’s main public view with a splash screen that lets visitors know you’re working on something, and it sends the proper http header for search engine spiders.

They also no longer say “deactivate all your plugins” as part of the upgrade instructions. WordPress will now deactivate any troublesome plugins when it upgrades. If it ain’t broke, don’t waste your time deactivating it. From start to finish, it took about 40 minutes which included my downloading a backup copy of my theme files and the database. The majority of the time was waiting while my slow DSL connection uploaded all the files via FTP.

The upgrade reported an error, but finished anyway:

WordPress database error: [Duplicate entry ‘910-1’ for key 1]

INSERT INTO wp_term_relationships (object_id, term_taxonomy_id) VALUES (‘910’, ‘1’)

Upgrade Complete

Your WordPress database has been successfully upgraded!

Quite some time ago I had installed Ultimate Tag Warrior but took it out when it wasn’t compatible with a WordPress upgrade. Now WordPress has its own simplified support for tagging. Truth is, I’m really bad about tagging. I remember to do it sometimes, most of the time I don’t. I find searching to be more effective than tagging, even when tagging is implemented more consistently than I’ve ever been able to discipline myself to do. So I’m guessing that the error had something to do with the new tagging architecture not liking some remnant of that old plugin that got left in my database. Oh well. Can’t see a problem anywhere else, so I won’t worry about it.

The new update notification system let me know that my WordPress Stats plugin was out of date. Every other plug-in appears to be working.

I love that the new “Advanced WYSIWG” menu has been taken to the full version from WordPress.com. No more going over to code view to set headers, or cleaning text through TextEdit before importing. It is also helpful for copy/paste between Word files without getting all that <mso> garbage that tends to come along for the ride.

Now that I’m done, how many seconds will it take for WordPress to release a security update, forcing me to go through the whole thing again?