michaelcarden.net

Worthwhile WordPress upgrade

I mentioned back in June that I briefly toyed with the idea of activating blog comments and what happened when I did. Not long after, Chris Samuel blogged some positive suggestions for managing blog comment spam. He was quite right, but there was one fairly important reason why I did nothing about it. My blog was running a version of WordPress that was, oh, about 25 versions out of date.

Yep, I hadn’t moved from version 1.2.2 in spite of hearing occasionally of shinier new downloads. So the cool features like built-in comment spam filtering weren’t available to me. Today I finally bit the bullet and jumped onto the upgrade train.

This involved:

• Backing up the database,
• Backing up the rest of the installation,
• Downloading and installing version 1.5,
• Getting 1,5 going,
• Backing that up,
• Downloading and installing version 2.2.2,
• Setting up Akismet to trap spam.

After all that, the benefits of several years of WordPress development were unveiled to me and I have to say that it all looks pretty good. I still have to learn what all the unfamiliar bits do though.

Finally I’ll need to wade through about a kajillion themes to find one for the blog that’s not too ugly. There may be some random ugliness in the meantime though.