Well, I’ve migrated to WP 1.2 here in the last couple of minutes. It’ll take far longer to write this entry than it did to make the update.

The IJSM.org WP Upgrade Process

1. My first process was to run my backup shell script so that I had a good backup of my present state; after all, I’ve made a couple of posts today. Running ./backup was quick and painless for me.
2. I then made a quick copy of my pre-existing index.php file, saving it off as wp-102-index.php. A happy cp index.php wp-102-index.php and I was done.
3. I then needed to get the scripts for 1.2; wget http://wordpress.org/latest/ always does the trick. [Actually, I was logged in to SF, so I used my direct link to the archive, but whatever.]
4. I then needed to unpack everything, which was a happily-quick tar -xvzf wordpress-1.2-mingus.tar.gz.
5. I then quickly checked the README file to be certain of the upgrade procedure. I only want to do this once.
6. I then ran mv wordpress/* ./ to move all the files down. Well, of course I had to go back and grab the directories nested therein—e.g., mv wordpress/wp-admin/* ./wp-admin/—but that’s minor, really.
7. I then ran the upgrade script and prayed silently but quickly. It’s not that I don’t have faith in the WP devs: I just have bad luck.
8. I checked my index, saw the fugly layout, and went back to the shell to cp wp-102-index.php index.php. There we are–happiness again. Oh, not quite! I had to quickly comment out the links-update-xml.php call. I don’t know why this has been balky for me of late, but I’ll check that later. [I do have work to do this afternoon, after all.]
9. Yep, there’s the happy layout I know and love.

This is not to say that I’m 100% happy; I’ve already got a niggling bitch to make about the layout of post.php, but hey … I can get back to that later.

The upgrade path is pretty darn simple. Once I’ve kicked the tires, I’ll be rolling this out network-wide.

Yay.

Thanks to Jeff, I picked up three Over the Rhine rarities CD’s from Paste Music: Besides, Amateur Shortwave Radio, and The Cutting Room Floor. At this point, the only pieces of the OtR discography own are Patience, Eve, the independent release of Good Dog, Bad Dog, and The Darkest Night of the Year. At Jeff’s behest, I’ll hold off on buying TDNotY until late October or early November, since it is their retelling of the Christmas story. I can’t promise that I’ll wait on the rest.

Best be saving your pennies, put ‘em back for a very long walk…

[Man, Weblogging during the heyday of my discovery of CC would be sooooooo rewarding ...]

I’d strongly suggest that the WordPress folks take a breather, walk outside, relax, and then come back and think about where we go from 1.2.

As I’ve suggested before, I think that WP 1.2 is mis-versioned; I feel like 1.0+ was WP 0.8-ish, with what we have in 1.2 a true, credible 1.0 release.

I would love to see WordPress scale down the model laid out by the Mozilla project: regular releases with feature roadmaps. For example, Asa Dotzler just announced a change in the Mozilla release scheme, going from three-month cycles to twenty-week cycles:

The new milestone plan will contain one additional alpha cycle and lengthen the alpha and beta cycles some giving us: alpha1 (6 weeks,) alpha2 (6 weeks,) beta (5 weeks,) and final (3 weeks.)

The obvious question for WP is now going to be: Quo vadis? In answering that, a little time for introspection and planning will be good.

Maybe it’s just me, the inveterate planner, speaking … who knows.

[edit] Crap, I forgot to end with my closer: open code is one thing; a fully open project is another. I, as a user, want to know where we’re going from here.

Why is the GUI better in WordPress v1.2? It’s because Matthew Thomas has been involved in developing it.

That’s not to say that mpt is a GUI god or something, but having someone with experience is a good thing. I’m glad that people are adding their own expertise to the project. Some free/FREE projects can end up acting like a barn raising–folks pulling together, adding what they know to it.

It doesn’t always act like that, and maybe WP hasn’t always been that way, either, but give Matt and everyone else credit for their bits.

At some point, Matt and the other devs need to make notes on who contributed what to WP1.2. I know that there are more cooks working on the broth these days. WP will never need to have as many code monkeys as your high-profile projects, but let’s remember that there are many stakeholders in the development process, and they need their due. For instance, I know that Alex has been involved in l10n and i18n, and I’m sure that others helped, too.

WP 1.2 is out. Moooooo.

I imagine I’ll update ijsm.org today; that may mean for some look-and-feel flukiness, depending upon how many changes have been made to index.php.