Just a few comments on the all-round goodness of WordPress 2.7.1.

What didn’t I like about wordpress?

I didn’t like the PITA that it was to upgrade wordpress when a new version came out. Previously you had to back everything up, download and extract the new files, overwrite your existing files in a particular manner, ensuring not to overwrite certain ones, and while it wasn’t exactly laborious in comparison to other installs and fixes, it was something that would be a considerable pain, particularly for those less technically-minded.

So when WordPress 2.7 offered the ability to upgrade with a single-click (although you still have to carry out your own backups), this sounded ideal. And it was. If you need to upgrade, you just visit the tools menu, select Upgrade (now there’s a surprise), and it will carry out the upgrade for you automatically. Well dones all round.

Upgrading and installing new plugins — or deleting old ones — works similarly. WordPress can do it for you through the administration menus. Granted, this means you’ve probably got slightly less control, particularly over stuff like fine-tuning, but it reduces the PITA quotient significantly, and that has to be a good thing.

I did have one problem with WordPress 2.7, however, and this was to do with scheduling posts. I frequently write posts in advance (e.g. I will write a post one evening for publication the next day), and this suddenly started not publishing the posts at the set time, instead just giving me a ‘missed schedule’ message and there not being any way of actually publishing said post (basically, you had to cut and paste the text out of it into a new post, publish that now, and delete the old post). This was a major PITA.

I ended up working around it by simply leaving the posts in draft status, and then manually publishing them the next day. Not ideal, but it was probably the best compromise solution. Looking into the problem on the WordPress forums seemed to suggest that they felt the problem was with the hosting platforms people were using. Many were sceptical of this — how likely was it that suddenly lots of hosts would have a problem at exactly the same time users were upgrading from WordPress 2.6.5 to 2.7?

Blog Highlight identified the problem on the 30th of January. It does relate to the hosts to some extent: if your host’s server is even slightly off from “WordPress Official Time”, the scheduling won’t work. This was obviously somewhat of an issue as I presume it’s next to impossible to co-ordinate millions of servers to exactly the same second, even if local time doesn’t cause added complications.

Fortunately, this issue was fixed in the maintenance release WordPress 2.7.1. You don’t mind problems so much, provided that they are looked at and addressed promptly, and that’s what the WordPress peeps have done here.

At this point, I also should give a ‘shout out’ (sigh) to the WordPress.com stats plugin, which I have recently installed, although I was initially put off by mistakenly thinking that it would only produce statistics for WordPress.com blogs.

Nope. The stats are collected and recorded on WordPress.com (so you need not only your API key but your wordpress.com account details to use it), but it will record the usual sort of things that these stat packages do — visitors, most popular pages, referrers, search terms and the like. It is not as comprehensive as most separate stats packages — the one provided by by hosting company gives a lot more information — but they key advantage that it does bring is that it is integrated with the administration of your blog, so it’s very easy to see and access.

And of course, whenever anyone views their stats, they are legally obliged to list a couple of the more unusual searches by which people have located their site.

• i need a man to help me uk
• the clap symptoms
• things beginning with letter c
• does harry potter die in the end

I am not entirely sure why I am seen as the foremost authority for these questions, but there you have it…