WordPress 2.0 was released yesterday and the WordPress community is buzzing with the news.

But before you decide to upgrade your installation, make sure that your blog is ready for it. There are a number of people reporting bugs and other hitches in their upgrade process on the WordPress support forum.

Because WordPress 2.0 has a large number of features and additions under the hood, it’s not an entirely standard WordPress upgrade.

Upgrading can actually cause you more problems than it solves if you’re not careful.

So, before you upgrade:

  1. Back up your old website files and databases
  2. Review any custom alterations you’ve made to your WordPress blog and verify that you can also make those modifications to WordPress 2.0
  3. Verify that all of your plugins will work with WordPress 2.0, and before you upgrade - make sure to disable all your plugins first.
  4. If you run into any problems, conduct a search first to ensure your question hasn’t already been answered elsewhere.
  5. If you do need to request help on the support forums, make sure to provide them with enough information to help you.
    • URL to the site or problem link.
    • A succinct but detailed explanation of the problem.
    • A screenshot whenever applicable.
    • Subscribe to your question’s feed so you can follow the replies to your query without digging through the forum or starting a new thread.

And finally, make sure to read the detailed WordPress upgrade instructions before you begin.

New software is like a brand new house, you get to find all the quirks. If it’s not imperative for you to upgrade right away, give it some time and let the remaining wrinkles get ironed out first.