I upgraded two WordPress sites to the latest version, one was running 1.5.2 and the other 1.2. The thing is that I was not impressed at all by the upgrade process and provided documentation. Here are the issues I ran into:
- The readme.html provided with the download is totally misleading when it comes to upgrades. It makes you think that upgrading is a 3-step process -- dead wrong. You should check the upgrade instructions on the official WordPress documentation site, it has no less than 17 very detailed steps.
- In both cases as soon as I uploaded the new code, the sites went completely blank with absolutely no error messages. While trying to see what is wrong, I ran into the second major issue: the official WordPress forum. The forum does not have decent search (it looks like Yahoo search is used and it does crash on you) and features in general are missing. Less is not more in this case.
- After manually going through many pages of the forum and seeing that lots of people had 'blank page' problems, for various reasons, it turned out that I had to turn off caching by uncommenting a line in a php file. This is bad. Very bad.
- Upgrading a 1.2 installation is impossible following the official upgrade documents. You are supposed to upgrade in two steps, from 1.2 to 1.5 and then from 1.5 to 2.0. Fair enough, but this means that you need WordPress 1.5, try to find a way to download it. The download page offers only the latest version and even the old postings announcing 1.5 have no links to the download anymore. Again, manually paginating through forum provided the solution: http://static.wordpress.org/archive/
I really like WordPress, I think that it is one of the nicest pieces of software that I ever used, so I hope that I am not too harsh with these comments. I can see two problems with the WordPress official site: simplicity was pushed too far and the not invented here syndrome.
A quote attributed to Albert Einstein says: Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. In many cases I have the feeling that WordPress is pushing simplicity too far. The upgrade instructions are one example, the download page is another and so is the forum.
The not invented here syndrome is apparent when you look at the WordPress site as a whole. They seem to avoid other great software that would fit them just because it was created by someone else. Instead of using a proper forum software, and there are lots of high quality open source solutions, they are using an in-house mediocre solution. They lose twice by doing this: waste of time for one thing, they should spend time on what they do best, and low quality support for users for another. I would go one step further and I would suggest them to use a proper CMS solution for the whole site, something like Drupal or Xoops. One notable exception is the WordPress documentation site, it uses MediaWiki and the content is fantastic.
Update: It seems that the 'blank page' problem will be fixed in 2.0.1 :-)
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