I just finished the basic part of the upgrade from WordPress 1.2.2 to 1.5. One new feature is themes. I may go through a couple different themes before I settle one, though I may also hack on Neuron, the theme I’m currently using, a bit. Overall, I like it, but there are a couple things missing from the old template I used to use. If I end up doing that, I’ll release all my code changes in accordance with the GPL, of course. Unfortunately, the old theme I was using, Silver is the New Black, doesn’t appear to have been ported from a template to a them, yet.
In the meantime, I need to port over all my anti-spam comment hacks, since they have worked so well for me. I’ve had no spam comments in the six months or so since I enabled them. Before that, I was getting about 100 spam comments a day.
As for WordPress 1.5, there’s a lot to like besides the new themes feature. The Dashboard tab is interesting, and the rest of the tabs are better organized. It looks like there is also a new feature for publishing standalone pages to your website, in addition to blog posts. That will make it easier for me to use WordPress to manage my entire site. More later when it’s not nearly 2 a.m.
April 17th, 2005 at 3:23 pm
Robert,
Your current theme looks pretty! May I recommend Spam Karma 2 by Dr. Dave as an amazing very full-featured anti-spam all-in-one plugin for Wordpress? I was previously using a couple of different ones, but since installing SK2, I haven’t had a single spam-comment slip through, nor any false positives. It’s quite intelligent and allows plugins into it for additional functionality.
Podz has a great upgrade guide that explains how to preserve your 1.2 theme and incorporate it as a selectable theme in 1.5. I did that originally, before deciding to choose a new theme in order to give my site a fresh look.
I upgraded myself only a couple of weeks ago, but am very happy with the new package. I’ve got about ten of my favorite plugins happily integrated.
April 17th, 2005 at 5:21 pm
Thanks! Unfortunately, I’ve spent a painfully large amount of time on the upgrade. I probably should have just switched over to using Spam Karma, as you suggested. Instead, I adopted the stubborn position of forcing my old solution to work.
I actually did try to use a new plug-in for comment preview, but I couldn’t get it to work. Once I decided to use the previous approach I used for comment preview, I decided to go all the way and reimplement all my anti-spam tricks. My comment preview hack isn’t too attractive, though. I need to do some more work on that.
I’ve still got a bunch of sorting issues to work through in the sidebar. Overall, though, I’m pretty happy with the upgrade and the theme change.