Blog.SpoonGraphics Makes the Jump to WP 2.5

After the recent release of WordPress 2.5 I decided to give the update a shot on Blog.SpoonGraphics. The upgrade went almost issue free with lots of nice new features now at my disposal! Here is a brief overview of my favourite improvements and remedies to a few minor problems and issues.

My Favourite New Features

The first thing that greets you after the upgrade is the nice fresh administrator theme. The mixture of baby blue and grey is a cool modern image. After a short while I soon got to grips with the new low-fat menu layout!

One major improvement that comes with 2.5 is the inclusion of many new features, so many in fact I was actually able to remove a number of plugins, with the additions they provided now included as default.
Two such plugins included Multifile Upload and MyAvatars, now replaced by the built in media uploader and default Gravatar support.
On the topic of plugins, the automatic updater is very cool, making installing the latest releases a breeze. Instead of downloading the latest files from the author’s website, uploading them to your server and reactivating them through the admin panel, you can now simply update each one with the click of a button.
When writing your posts, you can flick onto HTML mode for quick tweaks here and there as well as insert media such as images and video directly from the new Flash uploader – Nice features but the cause of a slight problem for me, read more below.

Elsewhere there has also been a vast improvement in the Blogroll side of things, where users can now include multiple categories and lists of links in their sidebar.

Gravatar Theme Modification

In order to make use of the new Gravatar support, I firstly uninstalled the MyAvatars plugin which had previously held the job of placing a MyBlogLog or Gravatar image next to each commentor name. To allow the WordPress’ new Gravatar feature I simply had to add the following code into the themes Comments.php file at at line 30:

Popularity Contest Plugin Errors

Another issue that was experienced shortly after the upgrade was the error that appeared when trying to reactivate Alex King’s Popularity Contest Plugin. Luckily the solution was only a Google search away and the problem was soon resolved after visiting Ken McGuire’s blog.

Simply open up popularity-contest.php from your plugins folder, scroll down to line 59 and delete out one of the two sets of ‘../’ from the call for wp-blog-header.php. Re-upload the file and find the plugin now activates.

WordPress 2.5 Image Uploader Error

The most painful of problems I experienced was with the fancy new media uploader… which tended not to want to upload any media. After selecting an image the uploader would ‘Crunch’ the file but fail with a http error. Many solutions were tried from the WordPress support thread but this particular fix saved my blog:

Open up the .htaccess from your WordPress install directory and insert the following:

<IfModule mod_security.c>
<Files async-upload.php>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</Files>
</IfModule>

As highlighted on Josh Highland’s Blog.

The ability to upload multiple images at once is great for Blog.SpoonGraphics with the high picture counts found in the tutorials.

So, have you made the jump to WordPress 2.5 yet? Or are you waiting for the initial problems to be ironed out before going for the full change?!