First Impressions: WordPress 2.9

Over the weekend I have updated all my websites to use latest WordPress 2.9, and I tried to test as many features as I can on different setups, with many different plugins and overall this is great release, but as usual, it’s not all good with this latest release.

First thing that is noticeable after the upgrade is that memory requirements are once again increased, and on all my blogs increase is about 2MB.  And, here is the first negative side of this upgrade, and I don’t mean the memory increase but lack of warning to that effect. There were many discussions on including some kind of warning in this WP so that people are prepared to the fact that they need more memory allocated to PHP. If you run more than 10 plugins (and most blogs do, some have more than 20 or 30 plugins active), memory will easy go over default 32MB, and blogs will crash with out of memory notice. But, on the other side, memory increase is well justified, because WordPress is now some 10% faster than WP 2.8 was. Again, speed for some memory is a good trade of, but memory notice would be nice, because I expect that again we will see a lot of questions in the forums about this memory notice.

Core and plugins upgrade is great. Upgrading multiple plugins at once is great, but it’s not very logical, because it’s on the same panel used for core upgrade, and not at logical place that would be Plugins menu and panel. Hopefully, this will be moved in the next version.

I don’t like some of the changes made to post edit panel. They tried to add more Ajax features, but they are not done well. If you click Save Draft or Publish, loader will be displayed similar to all Ajax operations, but the operation is not done using Ajax at all. Maybe that was the intention, but it’s not working. Taxonomies widgets on this page (both standard tags and custom taxonomies) are behaving strangely. Button Add is not bellow the field living a lot of empty space beside the input box and adding new tags is not always visible.

But the worst problem is scheduled publishing, that on all my blogs have failed. I tried it over and over again, and none of the scheduled posts have been published, and all of them are marked as they have missed the schedule, and you need to do manual publish. This is something that MUST be fixed in the next few days. I tested some previous nightly builds, and they don’t have this problem.

So, overall, WP 2.9 is very good update. If you need scheduler feature, it’s best to wait a while before upgrade, if not upgrade right now. Also, check your PHP memory settings, and increase it to at least 40MB (if you have 10-15 plugins) or to at least 48MB (if you have more plugins than 15).