* I have upgraded from wordpress version 2.0.4 to wordpress version 2.1

I have successfully updated the PetLvr.com/blog/ last night to the latest version of WordPress. There were some issues, because prior to installation I had 58 activated plugins. I was hoping to reduce it down to about 20-25 activated plugins, but I’ve noticed that it was just easier to re-activate the ones that I wasn’t sure about – than remove the code from the templates.

So .. there are still 41 activated plugins .. but, I intend to remove them one by one over time as I go along. I first want to be sure that there is nothing wrong with the existing lot of activated plugins.

Of all the blogs that I have .. this was the one with the biggest worry. You see, PetLvr is my “mega” site as I call it and have many sub-domains and domain aliases into play. When I first started blogging back in May 2005 .. rather than create new MySQL databases .. I just created new tables for the newly created blogs. As such .. a complete backup of this MySQL database is 320MB in size. It’s too large for email or the automated Cron jobs. And, I have never tried to restore the database.

Yet – I do have almost 2200 posts and combine those two = WORRY before I did the upgrade.

Of the previous plugins that did not work .. my biggest lost was the Drop Down Categories. Until I removed the code from the template and deactivate the plugin .. it practically ate my blog for breakfast!

Of my other plugins that I deliberately did NOT reactivate .. was wp-cache plugin. I hated the delay it was creating and didn’t want to be relying on a plugin for the cache and speeding up the action. Isn’t that one of the new benefits of this version 2.1? I also deactivated all the stats – which, I never look at because it takes too long to load up in my Dashboard anyway … not to mention that one of my tables in MySQL database that’s the biggest – is the search history ones. I intend to delete it in the short term incoming weeks.

I did add a few new plugins, that I have been using around the other upgraded blogs .. to see how they affect this blog. Once all the blogs are upgraded, I hope to standardize all of the plugins and remove the ones that I do not want. Currently – they still sit there, but not activated.

Overall, with these 2.1 upgrades .. I really hate what WordPress has done with the categories, linking, and blogroll functions .. I don’t care what anybody else says .. I do not believe it is for the “better”.

Another thing that I hate is that suddenly, all of my default Categories are never clicked anymore. That’s annoying to me. I have to go into the Options and reset it with the bookmarks.

I will say that I am still disappointed with the integrated Image control inside the new 2.1 version of wordpress .. but thankfully, IIMAGE BROWSER 1.5.1 exists and someone from WordPress should take note.