Is Your Theme Ready For WordPress 2.8

The ever mutating WordPress will see another major update on the 10th. Of June. This time around I feel the update will not be as troublesome as earlier versions. It might actually be a breeze, thanks to the built in Upgrade Function added in WordPress 2.7 which allows users to auto update within the Admin panel.

As for the Theme that you are using, if it is good for WordPress 2.7, it should be good for 2.8, though I read somewhere that there was a small issue with the Thesis Theme when running on the beta version. However, since Thesis is a premium Theme, the developers should be the first to take care of it, so I doubt it will be a major problem.

In fact, most WordPress Themes do not break after any upgrade. Lots of users are still using the Themes that they were using way back to as early as the 2.0 version. The themes will work as usual and the only things missing will be the ability to use the new features that were integrated in newer versions and of course, the bugs and security fixes. So it not so much of worrying about the Theme, but more about security when you upgrade.

The major headache that you should pay more attention to are your plugins. These are what will normally screw up your blog when you do a major upgrade. The norm of course is to de-activate all plugins before upgrading and then activating them manually one by one afterwards. This way, you will know which are the plugins that are not compatible. Thanks to the advancement of WordPress, if any plugin is incompatible, you will not be able to activate it.

WordPress 2.8 comes with a host of new features but I won’t be rushing into upgrading. Like all major updates, I always wait for a couple of weeks after the release to see if there are any reports of issues after the upgrade.