WordPress 2.2.1: My OverView

Recently I have upgraded one of my sites to WordPress 2.2.1. I played around with it for 1 day and there are some pros and cons about the new update.

WordPress says: WordPress 2.2.1 is now available. 2.2.1 is a bug fix release for the 2.2 series. Since 2.2 was released a month ago, the WordPress community has been improving fit-and-finish by identifying and fixing those little bugs that can be so annoying and by fine-tuning some small details. The result is a nicely polished 2.2.1 release.

The big difference that I noticed about the new WordPress is that it accepts widgets now and has a better interaction with arrangements of categories (pages, categories, meta, etc). It seems to also load fast than the prior version and it was easily upgradeable. As for me I was happy with 2.1.3 and decided for the upgrade. I notice some files were changed as well. I Googled "WordPress Upgrade 2.2.1" and found a blog that list all the changes.

HowToSpoter, lists all the files that were changed. He has provided a great list which you can see below.

You really do not notice these changes at all, its like you have just installed WordPress fresh out of the box! Though there are some pros to it there are some cons which made me revert back to my first WordPress install at version 2.1.3.

The pros can be viewed below:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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!)
5. We now protect you from activating a plugin or editing a file that will break your blog.
6. Core plugin and filter speed optimizations should make everything feel a bit more snappy and lighter on your server.
7. We’ve added a hook for WYSIWYG support in a future version of Safari.

Source: WordPress

Now my cons of my upgrade from 2.1.3 to 2.2.1:

1. Since it is using widgets to reorganize the structure of the page, it didn't allow me to add or customize the templates further, and even though I thought I did it would not show up. You will need to use the widgets to add a custom box if you want to create a new area on the blog that is not already in the widgets. I tried to create an Amazon Box within the presentation. But nothing showed up on the main page. After adding the extra text box from the widget was I able to create the Amazon Box.
2. Template usage, WordPress says it will work with new and old templates. Well I do not know if that is true, since my template on my other website was contoured a little bit, and I viewed the website in both FireFox and Internet Explorer.

Though these are 2 issues I found that had taken me some time to learn and maneuver, I ended up reverting back to 2.1.3. I was already so use to using WordPress 2.1.3 (since I just upgraded from my old CMS a little over a month).

I am all for change and upgrade if its beneficial, if it takes me more than half hour to figure out everything then its not worth the upgrade since I spent a day just learning WordPress once I switched. So far WordPress is a great CMS program and its very easy to use, maybe in the future once another upgrade comes out I will upgrade in hopes to be user friendly to prior WordPress users.