So, I spent quite a bit of time yesterday setting up my wife’s webspace for a photo gallery of her own.  I installed WordPress since I was familiar with it first, but ran into some issues that are known between NextGen and our webhost – 1&1.  I scratched WordPress and then went with Gallery.  Installation for that wasn’t too bad, but Shanie didn’t care for it, plus she wanted to be able to blog along with post photos.  I tried WordPress again.

This time I decided to try the WordPress 2.7 RC1.  Finally, there is a stock administration panel that doesn’t suck.  The layout is different and there’s plenty of new options too.  I liked it so well I just finished upgrading a few minutes ago.  2.7 Final is supposed to be out tomorrow (I think), but upgrading takes only minutes, so it’s not a big deal.  I also grabbed the NextGen Gallery 1.0.0 RC2 since it is only compatible with the new 2.7 and it appears to work pretty well also.  More importantly, I was able to get around the thumbnail creation issue that is prevalent in NextGen on 1&1 hosts.  I switched to PHP5 (add AddType x-mapp-php5 .php and AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php to your .htaccess file)  and so far I haven’t timed out any while uploading a large number of images (or hi-res images).  Hopefully it’s fixed, or fixed well enough for me to use.

It does appear that my All-In-One SEO Pack plugin no longer works the same.  It is now thrown all the way down to the bottom of the New Post page.  I only used the tagging feature, so it was wasted anyway.    The Fluency Admin plugin also doesn’t work, but I like the new admin CP so well, I don’t care.  I’m not real sure what others don’t work with this version as I haven’t spent more than 10 minutes with it so far, but I don’t use anything all that advanced anyway.

Anyway, if you’re on an older version of WordPress, now is the time to upgrade (unless you really just want to wait a couple of days for the full release).  It’s very nice!