It’s brand new, and I’m still playing around with it – but I seem to have gotten the ‘bad’ features first, and so I’m rather negative on this version. Or perhaps it’s late at night and I’m tired of YAWU (Yet Another WordPress Upgrade) for my sites.

Mind you, the shopping list of new features is very, very impressive (the version highlighting looks promising). But on setting it up I found the venerable self-install is not active. Now, if the wp-config.php file is missing, it doesn’t offer to set one up for you – it just gives a cryptic ‘databases connection’ error (and to make sure my eyes weren’t deceiving me, I tried on wp 2.5.1 without problems).

Another new feature, the word count, was somewhat anemic, only updating after saves. Again, this isn’t serious, as I use my own word count solution that’s dynamic (and which I’m planning to add to ABTheme), but I had hoped it would either be as good (so I could phase mine out) or better (so I didn’t have to add features to mine!)

Another aspect – the wp-confg.php file now has THREE secret key values that need to be set – and none of them the original SECRET_KEY introduced in 2.5!

Instead, we have AUTH_KEY, LOGGED_IN_KEY and SECURE_AUTH_KEY – all of which require a unique random key.

So it’s going to be a busy week – expect a detailed analysis in the next AB Report, and any Open Source plugins upgraded as needed (I’m wondering what to do about my SECRET_KEY plugin for instance, since it’s not needed, but three new values are…)