WordPress Lesson 1: If New is Improved, Wait for the “.1″ Version.

Web development veterans will generally advise to wait for the “point one” version of a software release before getting all cutting edge about things. I tend to agree. When I began seriously working on this site in April, 2008, I hastily updated to WordPress 2.5.0. Not much later along came 2.5.1 all shiny and debugged and I had to update all over again. Not a huge deal, but 2.5.1 inevitably included numerous fixes to annoyances I was dealing with in 2.5. Plus it was more secure.

Moral of the story: if you have time to deal with bugginess and don’t mind being a bit of a guinea pig (that’s the whole idea of freeware, really), more power to you. Run with major version updates as soon as they’re released. If you have about as much patience as a monkey on crack, wait for the “point one.”