Should I upgrade? Version 2.6 is very seductive!

Should I upgrade? The past two or three days I opened my own Admin Panel in WordPress to see the following message:

upgrade image

I’m sitting here wondering about this… It used to be pretty convenient upgrading on Dreamhost, their one-click installs would speed you through the process: without any fussy backing up (all done), the entire install was copied to .old and the new files and files were copied from wp-content. It was an easy and beautiful thing to behold. All you had to do was turn off your plugins!

Now I’m on a manual install, and I have to do the whole thing manually… it’s not that difficult actually, as I’ve done it manually many times in the past. But it’s still a little more difficult. Of course the bigger issue is: Should I upgrade?

The new features are quite attractive: Take a look for yourself!

Click to watch this video.

This is always tricky to answer. If you watch the video, you’ll know that there is versioning of posts, better gallery type functions, gears-type functionality, and better flock-type tools for blogging things you find… If any of these features are necessary or highly desirable for you, then upgrading might be the way to go. Also, if this is your first blog and/or you have JUST started blogging, upgrading should provide you with all these benefits and not much downside.

For larger blogs or more production-sensitive sites, a little tardiness may be in their best interests because usually upgrading provides great new functionality and it can also break things, too. As I found out: version 2.5.1 breaks password recovery and I suspected , too.

I’m not upgrading IMMEDIATELY. Why? Because no matter how many bugs and flaws are removed, there are ALWAYS unexpected developments that need fixing, so it is likely that I will wait for those fixes to be applied and perhaps version 2.6.1 or at least until I know that there aren’t significant issues with this version. It’s very seductive though to try, so I’ll be upgrading some minor blogs and less high profile blogs so at least I will be armed with the knowledge of how things work. In fact, I’m pretty sure most regular bloggers have their play-blogs where they try stuff out first, too!

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