October marks a new version of WordPress – 2.0.5. According to the website, the major changes are minor bug fixes around feeds, custom fields, and internationalization.

Of course, I always like to do a line by line comparison, and it confirms what they’ve mentioned, with few major changes, and just a small smattering of improved security (most noticeable – the plugin for database backup).

Their site includes details of upgrading, and as always, if you’re using the AutoPost, Top10Tricks, or ActiveBlogging plugins, you can get AutoPost upgrades for the edit.php and post.php files at the Top 10 Tricks site.

Is it worth the upgrade? Well, security is not an issue for this update, so I don’t feel it’s a high priority to migrate, unless the changes affect you (for example, if you create non-English blogs).

On the other hand, going through the code I saw many minor changes; as a programmer, I get nervous when I see lots of code modifications (many changes=many chances to break). In cases like this, I’m willing to let others test it out, and I’ll wait awhile before upgrading my various blogs (although I’ll use it for new setups).

However, I did see an Internet ‘Guru’ with a 2.0.5 blog already, so my competitive nature means I may have to upgrade shortly – whether I need to or not…

Version 2.04 just came out -bug fixes, and more reliable. You can read more about it here.

I’ll be upgrading the easy installer for WordPress to 2.04 shortly (early next week most likely – for sites already using a previous version of WP, you can follow the regular instructions on upgrading on their Codex.

It’s upgrade time again!

Last week WP 2.0.3 was released (just in time to delay this report!), and included some very minor changes.

So the question is, is it worth an upgrade?

For the first time since the code base moved to version 2, I’d have to say yes.

Although the security issues are significant, they likely won’t affect many (I sure hope I’m not proven wrong saying that!), but the code certainly seems more stable.

For example, I have been patching the previous versions of v2 code to get it to work on my local Windows machine for testing. Usually, the WordPress cache was corrupted by Windows linefeed and return combinations (because WordPress is run most often on Linux/Unix servers, and they use a single newline, the two characters instead of one was enough to jam the cache system in some cases).

However, this version worked immediately, and flawlessly – so much so it wasn’t until several hours later I realized it’s the first version 2 that didn’t cause me grief during installation.

Now with that kind of ease of setup, I finally feel the bugs have been ironed out, and I’m anticipating my migration of all my older blogs to v2, and having my WordPress ‘world’ homogeneous.

Still, I’ll be sorry to see 1.5.2 go!