Upgrading to WordPress 2.2 was no sweat. Everything went smoothly and I didn’t encounter any problem whatsoever. The only thing I had to fix were some custom fields or parameters for a couple plugins that I used. Aside from upgrading my WordPress installation, I also installed and re-installed a few plugins.

1. Enforce .www Preference – I installed this plugin because I wanted to make sure that all queries and links to my blog point to only one URL which is http://jaypeeonline.net. If your site can be accessed with both http://domain.com and www.domain.com formats, most search engines treat them as two different domains therefore affecting your backlinks.

2. WP-Chunk – Once in a while, someone posts a comment and inserts a very long URL that overlaps the comment box and messes up the layout. This can be really annoying and with this plugin, you’ll no longer worry about those long URLs. WP-Chunk cuts off the long URL and displays a shorter version and you can also specify how many characters long for the displayed URL.

3. MyAvatars – I reinstalled this plugin after I noticed that my own gravatar wasn’t showing up. I could see other people’s gravatars except mine. I also activated the Gravatar support for this plugin.

Yesterday, John Chow made a post about the MyAvatars plugin being broken. He turned off the plugin after finding out that instead of avatars, the plugin displayed broken images. But not long after he published his entry, the plugin seem to be working again and the avatars were back. I guess the guys at MyBlogLog read John’s post and went to fix it right away.

4. LightBox 2.02 Plugin – I had this plugin when I installed the Lazy K Gallery plugin for my Photos page. A few weeks ago, I noticed that when I clicked on the images, they’re not displayed using Lightbox (Javascript-powered overlay popups). So I checked the plugin page and found a new version, LightBox 0.6.4 Beta. I replaced the one I had installed and after activating the plugin, I checked on my photos and this time it worked.

There’s one plugin I installed that I didn’t include in this list. I’ll feature it separately as a plugin review so watch out for it.

After the initial scheduled release was postponed, the much awaited WordPress 2.2 is now official. Nicknamed “Getz”, WP 2.2 is named after saxophonist Stan Getz. The release was announced earlier today and is now available for immediate download from WordPress.org.

New features:

• WordPress Widgets allow you to easily rearrange and customize areas of your weblog (usually sidebars) with drag-and-drop simplicity. This functionality was originally available as a plugin Widgets are now included by default in the core code, significantly cleaned up, and enabled for the default themes.
• Full Atom support, including updating our Atom feeds to use the 1.0 standard spec and including an implementation of the Atom Publishing API to complement our XML-RPC interface.
• A new Blogger importer that is able to handle the latest version of Google’s Blogger product and seamlessly import posts and comments without any user interaction beyond entering your login.
• Infinite comment stream, meaning that on your Edit Comments page when you delete or spam a comment using the AJAX links under each comment it will bring in another comment in the background so you always have 20 items on the page. (I know it sounds geeky, but try it!)
• We now protect you from activating a plugin or editing a file that will break your blog.
• Core plugin and filter speed optimizations should make everything feel a bit more snappy and lighter on your server.
• We’ve added a hook for WYSIWYG support in a future version of Safari.

Developer features:

• A new set of WordPress-specific XML-RPC APIs that allow for editing pages, setting categories, and much more.
• We now use jQuery for a number of internal functions, and hope to transition all of our JS to use it. (We still need volunteers for this.)
• Comment feeds now support multiple formats, including Atom.
• Our internal mail functions now use phpMailer, which allows for things like SMTP support.
• You can now set database collation and character set in your config file.
• You can also hardcode your site and WP URL in the config file, overriding the values in the DB.
• Finally we’ve increased the inline documentation of a number of functions inside of WP, which should help you navigate those parts of the code.

The “Deactivate All Plugins” is a good addition, too bad that the “Reactivate All Plugins” patch by Dougal Campbell didn’t make on time. So expect to see it in WordPress 2.3. Another excellent addition is the protection against activating broken plugins. I’m sure a lot of WordPress users have had an unfortunate experience with broken plugins so this feature is a lifesaver. I also like how they’ve integrated the Widgets support into the core so installing a plugin is no longer necessary.

After checking out all the new added features, I can’t help but get excited with this new version of WordPress. However, I’d still give it a few days or a week before I’d jump in and upgrade my installation.

Check out the list of changes for WordPress 2.2.

Download WordPress 2.2 “Getz”

New User Features

• Tagging support
• Permalink redirection
• Improved comment editing

Developer / Power User Stuff

• Atom 1.0 support for feeds.
• Multiple format comment feeds, including Atom.
• Switched to jQuery for core JS, which is lighter and faster.
• Atom API support.
• Additional XML-RPC APIs for pages and such.
• phpmailer was integrated for performance and maintainability.

Future additions

• New permalink redirection stuff
• An additional bundled theme?
• Widgets?

Good news right? Well, not for everybody. Apparently, the tagging support that is included in WordPress 2.2 breaks the good old plugin called Ultimate Tag Warrior. The conflict is brought about by the is_tag() function that is used by both WordPress 2.2 and Ultimate Tag Warrior. That’s bad news for people including myself who are using UTW. Fortunately Moeffju has found a way of fixing the issue with a UTW hack. It involves editing the ultimate-tag-warrior.php file with your text editor and replacing all instances of the is_tag function with UTW_is_tag. After this, just activate the plugin and it’s done.

Just found out that WordPress 2.2 does provide an importer for UTW tags and so I guess it’s not that bad after all for us UTW users. But it still means that once you upgrade to 2.2, you’ll no longer be needing the UTW plugin. Too bad coz I’ve grown to love that plugin. One final word for those who plan to do the upgrade. Check for any conflicts that your existing WordPress plugins might have with WordPress 2.2 before doing the upgrade. Better safe than sorry is what I always say.