So I’m sitting on the good side of the upgrade to WordPress 2.0 (official announcement) and so far I’m very pleased.

Things I dig:

1. The new, jazzy editor
   I realize that some folks dig all the control – and I’m one of those people – but having a nice, fast, web 2.0 WYSIWYG as a blog editor is faboo.
2. Akismet
   Anything would beat SpamKarma, my previous spam-defeating (Ha!) plug-in. Fingers crossed that Akismet is better than advertised.
3. Faster performance
   Posting and navigating around the admin seem much faster. I hope this speed also applies somewhat to serving content as well.
4. Inline file upload from post tool
   I’ve heard through Greg that I might have to do some work to get this to behave the way I want, but an inline file upload is far better than the separate admin tool of previous WordPress incarnations.
5. Theme thumbnails
   I don’t switch themes very often (if at all anymore), but I can see why most folks would love this feature. It’s especially useful if you have a stable of layouts and you want to make quick change to something suitable to the holiday or mood that is at hand. This dovetails nicely into my “to do” list ofr WordPress 2.0 – I need to update and document my own homebrew theme: Curtains Up.

Things I need to do:

1. Update my theme to include all the tweaks of the last 6 months and add a thumbnail.
2. Change my permalinks structure and update .htaccess to deal with the new URLs. I should have done this during the last upgrade or before the current upgrade, but I’ve gotten lazy. Basically, I just want shorter URLs and I realize the /archives/ business is redundant. I may just go to /year (2 digit)/month (2 digit)/day (2 digit)/post title. I’d use the standard ?p=id# if it didn’t have an adverse effect on search engine crawls/ranks.
3. Kill all my unused themes and plug-ins. I just need to tidy up all the back-end crap sitting on my webserver. Spring cleaning and New Year’s straightening and all that. I’ve also got a bunch of never-going-to-be-finished posts that need to be deleted. The time for timeliness has passed on most and I don’t feel like being 6 months late on a meme just to say I posted something.

I’m sure I’ll find more annoyances and things to rant and rave about, but for now, I’m thankful for the 5-minute upgrade and a clean, working blog.

UPDATE: I’ve been having a bit of trouble sending trackbacks, but I think I have it fixed. *fingers crossed*

UPDATE II: I just tried this trackback fix, which might be working.

UPDATE III: Nope. Here’s the trackback fix that worked for me:

I added the following:

require_once(‘execute-pings.php’);
execute_all_pings();

before these last two lines at the end of post.php

include(‘admin-footer.php’);
?>

This is a temporary fix. I do not know if it causes any other concerns but testing it seems to fix the trackback issue.