Last week I upgrade to WordPress 2.7 and the week before that I upgraded to 2.6.5 from version 2.3. For this entry, I’ve isolated my four main issues that I’ve came across since upgrading.

1) NO LONGER A SERIAL BLOG
For the last four years, I methodically took the time to make nearly every entry sequential, so post #1500 would be followed by #1501. But now WordPress skips numerous entries for each new entry. This pretty much renders my current system impossible. I would be able to immediately recall the number of the entry and now its a bit more labor intensive because each new entry is somewhat random. I liked having “ugly links” (ie, those ending in numbers instead of words) because it prevented spammers from plundering entries based of the text of the title, and now I’m seriously considering changing this blog’s permalink structure so its more easy to manage.

2) FOREIGN WORDS WERE CHANGED
There have been significant changes to the text related to foreign words. Where there once was an accent grave there is a bunch of lexical gibberish. This means that over time I’m going to have to go back change every single entry where the text was modified. I’m not looking for to doing these edits. I mean do you know what Vélib’ is?

3) RELATED POSTS ARE NOW MORE DIFFICULT TO POST
For nearly a year now I’ve been using the Posts in Category plugin at the end of nearly entry. I’ve found this to be a very useful plugin for readers of this blog because the viewer is automatically given all possible options for further reading. To use the plugin I would always have to go to my Categories page and find the unique Category ID Number so that I could use the plugin to show the related posts in that category. With the upgrade, the Categories page does not use numbers, but text-based slugs. This means its nearly impossible to find the exact Category ID Number and I still haven’t a figured out a quick & easy method for doing this.

4) FINDING NESTED CATEGORIES IS NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE
The Category search function is deficient for hierarchal link categories. For example, I have one link category called Location and within this category I have listed nearly all of the different places I’ve made maps of. But now I can’t find any of these categories! If I were to search for Ballwin (LOCATION–>MISSOURI–>BALLWIN) on the category page I would not receive a result– it would show up empty! The only work around I’ve found for this has been to directly edit WordPress’ source PHP page to show 100 different categories per page, instead of 20. This allows me to manually find the categories, but its still a pain.

Now I could easily mention 4 improvements over the previous version(s), but these are the issues that have been bothering me since the upgrade. Maybe I’ll revisit this praise in a future entry.