Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

Just three hours ago, Matt posted this on the wordpress-hackers mailing list:

Subject: [wp-hackers] 2.0 Release

Wednesday or Thursday, depending on the phase of the moon.

Now would be a great time to start making sure your themes and plugins work with the new version, and post to hackers if you need any help updating them.

Yow! On the one hand, I’m really excited about this release. A lot of the changes are under the hood, with tons of new API hooks, a new object cache system, new user “roles and capabilities” security model, fixes and code refactoring. The major immediate change that most users will see is the new WYSIWYG post editor. Personally, though, I’ll turn that off, because I prefer crafting the xhtml for my posts by hand.

The new API hooks are going to enable a whole new class of themes for WordPress which have built-in customization options. An early example is Michael Heilemann’s K2 (which is actually built off of WordPress 1.5, but will take advantage of 2.0 features soon).

On the other hand, as you might infer from the ‘2.0’ version number, this is a major change release. You may very well run into ‘issues’ (as we in the software development community like to politely call them) when upgrading from older versions of WordPress. I strongly suggest that anyone who is upgrading an older version of WordPress to 2.0 should backup everything. Backup your entire existing wordpress directory and your database tables. This is particularly true if you rely on third-party themes or plugins. Most people will probably upgrade without incident. For for those (hopefully) few who run into problems, a backup is going to be essential.

That said, it looks like it could be a very Merry Christmas indeed for us WordPress users 🙂