As I’ve already noted, I’ve upgraded to WordPress 1.5. Unfortunately I’m not entirely happy with the results. It certainly isn’t all bad, there have been lots of improvements. The new default theme is visually much nicer than the original, but I don’t care for the feature changes. So at some point that will have to go. In the short term I may just go with a theme from the WordPress theme competition, in the long term I’d like to incorporate some of the features from Eric Meyer’s site.
There are lots of other good things in WP 1.5. I was disappointed to see rel=”nofollow” automatically added to every link in every comment, without an option to turn it off. One of the things on my to do list is to figure out how to prevent that from happening, even if I have to rip the code out. While nofollow is a nice idea, it doesn’t do squat to prevent comment spam. Since I’ve upgraded to WP 1.5 I’ve received more than 600 comments, virtually all of them spam. The new moderation abilities made dealing with all this a bit easier, but prevention is the real solution. To that end it would be nice to something like WP-GateKeeper part of the default install.
The default theme also broken/useless feed links. I don’t know what the idea was behind that. I’m also not 100% happy with my approach to links via regular link dumps. Perhaps I’ll end up using something like del.icio.us, but not completely satisfied with that either. Some how I’ve got to find the time to work these things.