I have finally upgraded wordpress to 2.5.

The old version was 2.3.1 ( yeah that old ) and the upgrade was pretty smooth.  I didn't use plugins like instant upgrade for this upgrade but I'm thinking of using for the next upgrades.

How did I do it?

I have my own method for this. It's very similar to what they descibe in the official upgrade docs but a bit modified.

Here are the 7 steps I followed:

1. backup the database using the backup plugin
2. remember ( write a list of) active plugins then deactivate all ( so if any plugin will not work in the new version you can still access the blog and the admin interface )
3. make a backup of all files ( assuming current install is in public_html ):

4. download and extract the new version ( it will create a wordpress folder so make sure you don't already have one cause it will overwrite the files in it ) :

5. use rsync to copy the new files over the old files ( note the exclusion of wp-content to preserve the modifications you might have done to themes and plugins ) :

6. call the upgrade.php script, go to : http://your_own_blog.tld/upgrade.php
7. reactivate the plugins you had active before the upgrade

The whole thing took about 10 minutes and there were no problems encountered except for a few plugins that could not be reactivated because they were incompatible with the new version.

What I like about it?

I like the new interface,it seems friendlier, faster, more slick and  I was getting  bored of the old one.

I don't care much about the dashboard, but I love the way the WYSIWYG editor works.

I think the feature that I love the most is the automatic plugin upgrade but this is also the one that I think it needs more work ( of course there may be others that I did not notice yet )

what id didn't like?

Here are three problems I found with the automatic plugin upgrade:

1. the first time I tired it id didn't seem to care that I selected "No" for the "Use SSL" option and it just told me it could not connect.
   This was because my ftp server did not have ssl enabled but it was impossible to know this was the cause because it was clear to me from the web interface that it was not using SSL until I went in the code and just run a print_r on the $credentials variable .
   I'm not sure why this happened, I guess a bug. I had to go into the database and manually edit the ftp_credentials option and set ssl to 0 and then the plugin upgrade worked.
2. It doesn't remember the value of the "Use SSL" option. After I go in to upgrade another plugin the option is set to "yes" even thou in the database it is 0.
3. it removes the old plugin first and then tries to install the other. If the new version install doesn't work for some reason you are left with no plugin and you will have to go in and install manually the old way. I think a bettwe approach would be to first deactivate the old plugin, make a backup copy, try to install the new one and if it doesn't work restore the old plugin.

Conclusions

Overall wp 2.5 brings good improvements and great new features but as with any new major version increase there are a few minor details not taken good care of. Waiting to see what the 2.5.1 version wil bring on he bug fixing side.

Have you upgraded yet?  what are your thoughts on the 2.5 version ?