Professional PHP

Well, I upgraded to WordPress 1.5 today. Everything seems to have gone well. The upgrade from 1.2 to 1.5 was much less error prone than the upgrade from 1.02 to 1.2. The upgrade process is very well done. My BBCode plugin seems to work without modification (so far).

The new features in 1.5 are nice. I notice a few little navigation extras in the templates. The admin area seems like an improvement. I like the dashboard.

The comment moderation process has improved from miserable to annoying. I think it may now be easier to dispatch spam within WordPress instead of phpMyAdmin, which I was using with 1.2. The ‘Check Past Comments against moderation list’ is a great idea, except it doesn’t pay attention to comments that have already been manually approved. Now if only there were a ‘Check Past Comments against Blacklist’ option. An ‘Add This Url to Black List’ command would be useful on the comment moderation page. It would also be helpful to have a note on why a particular comment ended up in the moderation list for debugging false positives. Oh well, there are probably plugins for all of these things.

I started to play around with a custom theme. The theme system is very nice. I think the CSS in the default theme for 1.5 is easier to understand that the CSS in 1.2. If you visited the site this afternoon, you might have caught a glimpse of various themes, including my custom theme. Unfortunately, I found that many of the downloadable themes don’t display correctly on Safari, my default browser. This is not uncommon to run across small blogs that don’t layout correctly in Safari. My problem is the opposite. My CSS never works right in IE/Win. I hate that CSS is so finicky and requires so much manual testing.

Still no built in preview capability for comments.

I’ve been waiting for the official 1.5 release for a while and overall, 1.5 is very much worth the wait.