Extendably.com

Plugins in WordPress 2.6

Written by Josh on Monday, July 21st, 2008

Who doesn’t like a new release?

For Tech blogs everywhere it gives them plenty of opportunities, resources and new material they can cover at great length.

In fact it was one of the reasons I was so surprised about Technology related blogs and publications everywhere panning Vista so much… since when did it make sense to turn customers off what is potentially tomorrows stories? You can only write about the same XP hacks and tips for so long.

Anyway, this week saw the release of WordPress 2.6 following closely on the heels of 2.51 and about a month ahead of schedule.

WordPress 2.5 was a major release and so there were the usual compatibility issues with plugins and some themes. Most popular plugins where updated in the months following, although some people waited for a few months until they could be sure of a trouble free upgrade and there plugins all working correctly.

Luckily you shouldn’t have to worry about this with WordPress 2.6 as it was designed to be fully backwards compatible, the official blog post about the release said

2.6 is pretty much identical to 2.5 from a plugin and theme compatibility point of view, so upgrades from 2.5 should be pretty painless. The 2.5 branch will no longer be maintain so everyone is encouraged to upgrade.

I upgraded this blog on the release day and had no issues whatsoever with my installation or any of my plugins. That may not have been the case for everyone however as Joost de Valk’s post shows:

Some of you have noticed that there are some issues with the settings of my plugins. Unfortunately WordPress 2.6 exposed a bug in some of my plugins, that could only be fixed by changing the way these plugin store their settings.

So don’t worry about upgrading WordPress 2.6 from a plugins compatibility point of view, in fact it’s highly recommended.