I’ve been using version 1.2 of WordPress while the rest of the world forged on without me, so I finally made the plunge and upgraded. The reason I had been holding back was because I had made oodles of changes to the actual code, meaning when I upgraded I would have to either merge my changes into the new code or lose them.

For now, I’ve decided to lose them and see what 1.5 has to offer, because many of the features I added may have been included in the newer version.

I was also hesitant to switch because I needed to port my e-mail notification plugin to the new plugin framework of 1.5. Well, I haven’t done that yet, so there won’t be an e-mail notification for this post, but I plan to work on that soon.

I’d like to become more familiar with the changes to 1.5 and the new plugin framework so as I make future changes I won’t have to worry about merging them in during future upgrades.

I’ve been using 1.5 in another blog that I run, but one of the first things that I’ve been impressed with was the speed difference. On the same server with the same version of MySQL and PHP, pages are loading much faster, so that’s a huge benefit. I’m also pleased with the look of the admin pages. It’s easier to see which plugins are enabled and there are lots of little polish items all throughout. A belated thanks to all who worked on the release of WordPress 1.5.

To those of you who are still using 1.2 and are thinking about upgrading to 1.5, here’s one gotcha that took me a while to solve. If you have a large blog (according to the dashboard I have 1,145 posts and 5,771 comments, contained within 33 categories) make sure you edit php.ini and change the memory_limit to something like 64M instead of the default of 8M. That will save you some head-scratching when the upgrade script produces an error (or just returns a blank) because it ran out of memory.

The templates switch took a bit of time, but it wasn’t all that bad. If you noticed anything that’s not working right, please let me know.