I’ve been blogging on WordPress since 2004, when Om Malik suggested I get back into blogging after a brief, but discontinued foray on Blogger back in 2002. I have my own host — Churbuck.com — at Cape.com (now Meganet) and had been running a simple Frontpage-built set of static pages for a couple years, primarily tending to the domain so I could enable the churbuck.com email address.
I installed WordPress and after some serious stumbling and fumbling, figured out MySQL, Php, and the old days spent in front of IPswitch’s FTP client transferring files and building directory structures on my host.
I love WordPress — indeed I would go so far as to claim it is the most significant and beloved piece of software in my life over the past twenty years — and it just got better.
Much better.
While I was in my admin dashboard this morning I saw the suggestion that I “automatically” upgrade to the latest version. In the past, any time I attempted a maintenance upgrade of my blog I would usually kill it, requiring the intervention of more capable minds, such as Mark Cahill to get thing sorted out and running again. Mark told me when he last upgraded me in July that the auto-update would be coming, and well, yes it is.
About one minute, a simple, straightforward set of questions, and ta-da, I am up to date with the latest verison. Gratitude aside, this auto update is a big step towards making WordPress the defacto opensource content management system for the world, taking out the technical/sysadmin barrier to entry that makes self-hosting so challenging for people like myself, who don’t have the time or cause to get good at the essentials of open source LAMP based hosting.
I love WordPress.
I’m turning it on at all the blogs I manage – it’s just way too easy. The problem is that even with the simplicity you saw, many blogs will never get updated. They’re sitting out there abandoned and unloved. A perfect target for hackers.
A sneak peak at the next great feature: Threaded Comments – which will appear in 2.7. This is gonna be great.
I’ve been on wordpress for many years now. I had started with blogger, and tried Moveable Type. MT died after 1800 entries. I’m very happy with the WP auto-upgrade function. I would put off manual (FTP) upgrades as long as possible because of the annoyance factor. And if you follow the step-by-step upgrade, you get a nice little backup file too.
I’d even go so far as to say the WP upgrade is better then a fantastico upgrade. The fantastico upgrades usually killed any customizations or modules added. I hate when that happens.