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When we launched our business/technical blog system under this domain/url, it was done with WordPress version 2.7 and later we upgraded it to 2.9 (Carmen McRae release) last year. Now WordPress announced its version 3, with major revisions.  WordPress community announced that 1217 bugs were fixed (which means our present blog system has 1217 bugs) which is not a small number. It has 4 digits.

Next week, we will be upgrading to the new WP 3.0 and we when have started planning now few things come to my mind.

• The first thing would be Database backup.
• The only major task involved in WP upgrades is theme and plug-in compatibility checking. We may need to change our present theme and sacrifice some plug-is if they do not work with the new version. The directory of plug-ins for 3.0 is yet to be displayed, we are waiting for that.
• We are preparing a list of plug-ins, I have asked team to give up some of the plug-ins like ‘Listen Now’, i do not see any use in it. We will also remove the video comment plug-in even if it is compatible with 3.0.
• WordPress has detailed guide for version upgrades, simply following up http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress helped us before.
• Finally we will check the site for validations, in a previous blog we discussed this too. 4 site design validations you should do before you deliver

Now why would we want to upgrade while the present 2.9 is working fine. Not just for the terrible figure 1217, But I like the following list of features which I see in WP3.

1. Create multiple blogs/sites with single control panel. This would be a boon for company like us, who run more than 4 business sites and blogs. But we need to find how easy it would be.
2. Contextual help in the same page. You get what is what within that section. I am sure this will help our customers who use WordPress or any blogging/CMS for the first time.
3. Custom Menu management: We so far used third party plug-ins for Menu based navigations. Some plug-ins works well with some WordPress versions, and some are not. This is the graceful feature which I welcome.
4. Support for short URLs: We need to check is the short URLs are automatically created or we need to use a service like bit.ly

Before we recommend the upgrade to our customers, we want to try and practice it in our system first. Can’t wait!

WordPress control panel has Auto upgrade at : http://blog.macronimous.com/wp-admin/update-core.php , we will try it and post it soon.

Have you thought about the right Data type which you should use?
Is VARCHR bad? Do you review the SQL statements that you have written? Do you know what sort of impact indexes produce? How to leverage the query Caching techniques? Do you follow the naming standards?

This simple slide teaches you the best mySQL practices to be followed up within 15 minutes.

Taking out the best from mySQL will improve the application performance, if its part of your day to day life get into these standards and practice the everyday. This presentation s from Ronald Bradford. Thanks to Ronald for sharing.