Back at the end of December, I wrote an article for ProBlogger entitled 10 Things You Should Know about WordPress 2.0. Three(ish) months and 2 security/bugfix releases laters, I think WordPress 2.x deserves another look – a follow up, if you will.
Importers
In December, I raved about the rewriting and re-implementation of a number of import paths from other blog systems Personally, I have worked with four of the six standard importers now available for Moveable Type, Live Journal, Blogger, Textpattern, Dotclear and RSS. I personally wrote the Textpattern script and I hope to have a Nucleus importer available for the next major release of WordPress. Contact me if you need it.
Anyway you look at, it’s great to see more availability for bringing content in from other systems. It still seems kind of boneheaded that there are no import paths from other WordPress or WordPress.com blogs but I imagine it’s only a matter of time.
Image Uploading
Image handling was one of my biggest pet peeves about WordPress 2.0. It was horrible when it was released but Andy Skelton did due diligence brilliantly on getting this feature to not only work appropriately but work phenomenally. Back in December, image uploading did not handle thumbnails/original size images well at all. If one used the Rich Text Editor included in WordPress, even when attempting to use the Original Size feature, it would insert as a thumbnail and scaling would create pixelated images.
There were inconsistencies between how image files were handled in the Rich Text Editor and how they were handled in the standard editor. There were inconsistencies that would prevent older WordPress users from using the same kind of file structure as they were familiar with (the new image uploader would upload to wp-content/YYYY/MM by default thus having to make sure folder permissions were set, etc.
I am happy to say that this piece of functionality is incredibly useful to me now and that the bugs have been ironed out. Way to go, Andy!
Rich Text Editor
The Rich Text Editor, while useful to a great many users, still is of no use to me. I still dislike it and I still advise bloggers to avoid its use. One of the biggest problems we have had at b5 is with bloggers who copy/paste directly from the internet and paste into the RTE. The RTE captures all the formatting of the copied text, including bad markup. In one case, the RTE caputed an unclosed <div> which needless to say, broke the entire layout of the blog.
The code behind the RTE has improved tremendously. Used in its basic form, without copying and pasting or adding/deleting/re-adding images, etc, it creates relatively clean and unproblematic markup and can be considered for basic blogging. However, advanced bloggers and bloggers who use a lot of images, I recommend the standard editor.
Additional Standard Templates
One enhancement that has come since WordPress 2.0 is a functions.php file. This is not a required template file but can be included in a theme to provide additional theme-specific PHP functionality or tags. Developers should be cautious when using this file and it is still recommended to provide add-on functionality via a plugin if possible.
Bugfixes and Changesets
You can see the full and exhaustive list of commits since the WordPress 2.0 launch here.
