I upgraded to WordPress 1.5 partly because I love upgrading my stuff and it had been a while since I did something new with my blog, and partly because I wanted to use the variety of features including built in spam protection.
Installation
Installation was dead simple, as the developers claim. Since I was upgrading from WordPress 1.2, all I had to do was delete old files, copy new files, and run the upgrade script. Since I am a smartass, I decided to copy the new files without deleting any old ones, hoping that new files will overwrite the old ones and everything will be cool. But when I ran the upgrade script, it gave me a very strange error. I learnt my lesson and deleted all the files and then copied new version in the empty directory. Bingo. It worked. My new blog was up and running within seconds. Although I waisted good half hour in copying the files, then deleting all the files, and then copying the files again. But I would blame my dialup connection for that. If I had a broadband, it would have taken maximum five minutes.
Features and Usability
For some strange reason, blogging engines come with very ugly default theme. So when you load your blog after installing it, the lousy interface really turns you off. They should probably ask the general public to design new themes based on their future version and include the best one. I guess I would stop my rant on default theme and talk about the real stuff.
WordPress 1.5 is very customizable. They have broken down every element of the blog in different CSS templates so it’s very easy to design your own theme without messing up a lot. You can even just change the way your posts look and let everything else look the same. I would love to make my own theme but I am too lazy and I couldn’t find other themes based on the new version so I guess I’ll have to wait until someone comes up with a layout that I like. Until then please bear with this layout. Looks are overrated anyway. The real thing is the contents (vanity!).
Few hours after I upgraded, I received dozens of spam comments. I was stunned. Then I realized I did not include any word in the spam black list. So I quickly black listed only one keyword that was common in all those comments. I haven’t received a single spam comment since. It’s kind of ironic that I get more spam comments than real ones.
Other than spam protection, this version includes better comment management, like requiring readers to register to be able to post a comment. But I am not using those features as long as my readers behave. I don’t even require email address for a comment, since anonymous cowards never give out their real name or email address, and real commentors might get turned off by having to enter too much information.
A little more about themes. Installing themes is as easy as copying the new theme in the themes directory and then activating it through the control panel. Earlier you had to overwrite the old CSS file, making it a pain to change themes on the fly.
Another feature that I liked is that you can add more pages in your blog and they will also be treated as blog posts. So now I can have stand alone pages linked on the right side panel and I can create them right through my composer, and not myself. Thanks for making me even lazier.
So I think’s its an excellent blogging engine. I havent seen other engines so I can’t really compare it with blogger or moveable type, but I wouldn’t want to migrate to anything else after this. Plus its features like multiple authors and nested categories would make it a perfect community blog or corporate blog.
My beef with wordpress is that it doesn’t allow for multiple blogs (like livejournal does, for example). I’m sure they’ll come up with that in due time.
Fawad, there is a way around that. You can install another blog in a different directory with different table names. All the blogs will run independent of each other.
Yeah, I’m aware of that. I guess I didn’t make myself clear enough. I was referring to the ability to host multiple blogs off a single installation. For example, in drupal, you can create a users group to allow blogging capability. All users in that group get their own blogs automatically. No filesystem/database level tweaking neccesary. That kind of functionality is required for larger scale deployments (like the one I’m working on at linuxpakistan.net). Creating tables and copying files over is a deal breaker in that case.