I finally got around to upgrading to WordPress 1.5. Why? To get back on the trunk, and to get some of the new features, especially templates and pages. Overall, my upgrade went pretty smoothly. I had to replicate a few of my core hacks, but 1.5 also eliminated the need for some of those.

To start with, I followed the 1.2 -> 1.5 instructions on the wiki. Surprisingly, I managed to create a theme based on my customized index page pretty quickly, which was a relief.

* I had capcha\-based anti\-comment-spam plugin installed before, and I haven’t put that back in place yet. I’m hoping the built-in stuff will improve things so that it’s not necessary, but that’s probably asking too much.
* The Loop has changed, and so I had to update my code that pulls in moblog and now_playing posts, but that went fine.
* I had written a function to fetch and echo out my del.icio.us links (filtered by category, if appropriate). I replaced this with rawlinson’s lovely rssLinkList plugin. Nice work!
* I had to fix what I consider to be a bug in. For some reason, this function doesn't include a seperator parameter, so that it spews out categories seperated by either <li> or <br>, neither of which is what I want. So I hackedto add this parameter toand. Ugh.
* Since my v1.2 setup uses the same index.php to display both the primary view and the archive view, I had added a couple of vars into to help me with this. I'm sure there's a better way, but for now I re-added a flag and a variable, but nastily pulled straight from the GET string.

A few other hacks of mine should be eliminated if I move to using Flickr instead of my own embryonic WP-based gallery. I'll post seperately on that topic.

Lastly, the only thing really missing is a tag-style UI for entering categories when posting/editing. I don't care for the plugins that add "tags" as additional meta-data alongside the existing category mechanism - I see these as one and the same. It's just a UI issue -- for me, the long list of checkboxes is awkward, and also makes it impossible to add a category on the fly. All I want is a single text field with tag guessing and the full list of tags shown below, just like the new del.icio.us posting interface. There's at least one plugin that seems to be heading in this direction, so I'll try that soon.

PS - the category edit screen is unwieldy when the number of categories gets large. There should be a nice UI solution to this.

More as I think of it. Thanks to the WP team for 1.5 - it's cleaner, and I like the new features. Way to go!