Upgraded to WordPress 2.5

WordPress, the publishing platform used for this site just got upgraded to version 2.5. As usual I used the Dreamhost “one click upgrade” and the upgrade to 2.5 was done within minutes. (I love this feature in Dreamhost 🙂 )

However it took more than a few minutes to actually get the site going after the upgrade.

The first major issue was that I could not login to the WordPress Admin Console ! The error message indicated a fatal exception while registering the widgets and hence the dashboard could not be opened.

I knew that the error was related to a WordPress plugin and hence checked on the 2.5 compatibility list. The culprit plugin was the “Disable WordPress Widgets” which I had configured on my previous WordPress installation.

To fix this problem, I just SSH’ ed to my web server and deleted the plugin file.

When I used to upgrade manually, I always used to disable all the WordPress plugin’s. (This is also mentioned in the WordPress upgrade instructions).However if your hosting provides a one click upgrade, you should be more careful to ensure that you don’t run into problems like above.

The other problem I had is with Alex Kings Popularity Contest plugin. The plugin just wasn’t activating and if you are also facing the same problem all you need to do is to edit the popularity-contest.php (Line 59, if you are using the latest version)

if (!isset($wpdb)) {
        require('../../wp-blog-header.php');
        akpc_init();
}

The line require(‘../../wp-blog-header.php’) has to be changed to require(‘../wp-blog-header.php’);

WordPress 2.5 has a refreshing welcome change to the UI of the admin console. However one thing I noticed was that too less of content was displayed on my 15″ widescreen monitor. For e.g. check this image below

The site name along with the various menus itself ate almost 50% of the screen. I guess while WordPress developers test on their PC,  they always do it on big high resolution 21″-29″ monitors. I am not sure if there is anything else which can explain the reason for this being overlooked.

However I loved the Automatic plugin upgrade feature, its very useful. Also I thought that the “upgrade automatically” link should have opened in a window of its own by default 🙂

Have you upgraded to WordPress 2.5 ? What is your opinion on WordPress 2.5 ?