Backend Additions/Upgrades

Backend updates can be very interesting, and depending on what you are doing, extremely tedious. This was the case with DeckerD, very tedious. How so? We’ll I was at school when I did this. I had nothing else to do at the time, since I was between labs and lunch. The fact of the matter is, I use Wordpress as my backend and the new version, 2.0, was a major upgrade, so I had to just delete files and transfer the new files to the server. Let’s just say, I never got that lunch break.

Spam Free

So everything worked great, actually. The upgrade was a success, and everything is still intact; images, downloads, information, links, etc. So, I was very happy about that. Total downtime was about 10 minutes. For you, it’s good, because I’m happy and when I’m happy I tend to want to write more. The fact is I upgraded for Wordpress 1.5 which worked great. Wordpress 1.2/1.3, on the other hand, had spam problems like no other. I had a spam plugin, and it still was getting 20 spam messages a day. As of 1.5, I haven’t had any spam.

New Backend Features

With the new system in place a have a few awesome features that I hadn’t had before, which some I’m happy about, and some I could just live without. One thing that is new for me, is the faster administration to my backend software. Now, being injected with a little dose of AJAX, now let’s me add categories on-the-fly and lets me move around certain administration panels around to help me let me do things faster.

The WYSIWYG Editor is new, but not a feature that I would use. For most people that use Wordpress as a blog, with a pre-defined style, that doesn’t really care about someone perfect markup, then they will probably find the new editor awesome. It gives the user an “MS Word” (or something of that) kind of feel to it, instead of a daunting textarea and quicktags. For me, I rarely use the quicktags and find myself always just writing the markup. Sometimes takes longer to do the quicktags rather than doing it manually; just my style I guess.

Another advanced feature that is now included, which I’m surprised was not implemented earlier, is the Inline Uploading feature. I have not yet used this feature yet, but I plan to in the future. I do now, though, that a friend of mine would make good use of this feature, especially since she has to update content weekly with PDF documents.

The new Post Preview feature is probably one of my favorite! The older versions I always disliked how you would write a post, then Save and Continue Editing (in the backend this states that you want to save your current progress, but do not publish it quite yet), and your preview shows up at the bottom of the post. The problem with preview versions was the fact that it was a preview based on the administration stylesheet, so it didn’t look anything like the final post would look like. In Wordpress 2.0, now you can view your post exactly like it will look like on the website as if it were live.

That’s about it, but it was enough to get me to upgrade and really benifit the changes. If is were you, I would upgrade to Wordpress 2.0.