Switching to WordPress

I’m switching from b2evolution to WordPress for one reason: WordPress can host my installation on my domain for $10 a year. My installation of b2evolution has been becoming obsolete, and you’d have to pay me more than $10 to go to the work of upgrading it!

In less than three hours of hacking, I’ve set up a WordPress blog on my domain, transferred my b2evolution posts and media, and changed all links to my old blog to redirect to my new one.

I’m impressed.

Upgrading to b2evolution 1.8 beta

I just upgraded to the b2evolution 1.8 beta.

Things I like:

• It allows a cleaner anti-spam solution provided by the Akismet plugin. The previous hack protected me from tens of thousands of spam comments and trackbacks. I have no plans to start using the new captcha or moderation features. (Did I mention that I like Akismet?)
• The statistics and graphs are neat.
• I’ll have to actually use it to find the rest.

Things I don’t like:

• There is no documentation explaining how to update a live system. Is this even possible? I ended up taking down my blog temporarily.
• This upgrade completely broke my custom skin, so I spent quite some time reassembling it. It’s still too cluttered and has a number of glitches. (The comments look awful.)
• The skin isn’t showing my list of categories.
• There are so many settings that I can’t find any of them.

This got me thinking: Is there any way to provide more of a one-click upgrade experience? Why can’t the backoffice pull down the new source and upgrade the database, at least for minor versions?

Update: If you’re using the Akismet plugin in the 1.8 beta, you verify that Plugins::trigger_karma_collect (in blogs/inc/_misc/_plugins.class.php) calls $this->load_plugins_table();. Compare with the CVS source if you’re not sure.