So I finally upgraded to wordpress 2.5.1 (from 2.3). I was somewhat nervous thanks to some commentary by their biggest competitor (Typepad by SixApart). I can’t seem to find the link anymore. Mind you the follow up articles from people involved in creating WordPress with long lists of things to do in order to upgrade didnt help either! It definitely made me wait for a while longer than usual.
So how was it?
The upgrade was no different to previous WordPress upgrades. It was a simple process. Click a button to deactivate all plugins, upload some files, type in a URL and then reactivate plugins. (of course taking a backup beforehand!).
I worried about my plugins, and only my books plugin isn’t working. Irritatingly the author has a beta which might fix the issue but it requires a version of PHP I don’t have. No big deal. The books archive is there mostly for my own use.
Back to the installation, it is possible Typepad has an easier installation from scratch, I have not used it so I cannot comment. WordPress has been very flexible and always met my needs so for now Typepad doesn’t get a glance. I cannot see anything that would make me consider switching right now. Without that, WordPress would have to screw up big time to make me move as switching platforms is a huge barrier (it strikes me as being harder than an upgrade) and a quick search on google for “moving from wordpress to typepad” showed only one result with no method around it, the rest were all moving the other way! Even the Typepad site talks about WordPress categories and does not mention WordPress tags). That also implies to me that right now Typepad are not targeting WordPress users.