Summary. The Resources for Life.com website was upgraded today from WordPress 2.3.3 to the latest 2.5 version to address formatting problems while using the Visual editor with the Apple Safari browser.
Website Downtime. The website was down today for maintenance from about 12:10 PM to 12:40 PM. The downtime for upgrading could have been reduced considerably using a different upgrade method than the one suggested in the three-step instructions. See below for a better upgrade plan.
Better Upgrade Plan. The instructions suggest deleting critical WordPress program folders and then copying over their replacements. In this upgrade situation, the FTP connection was quite slow resulting in a longer than expected time transferring the new WordPress program files. To reduce downtime, it would be possible to duplicate the folder containing the WordPress files. Upgrade the duplicated folder as a staging area (test folder). Once the files had transferred to the test folder, rename the original folder (with the old version of WordPress). Then, rename the new duplicate folder to have the name that the old folder had. In this way, during the few seconds it takes to rename the folders, the site may exhibit a brief outage, but not an extended downtime.
Reason for the Upgrade. A complete list of features and benefits of the new version can be found on the WordPress website. The primary reason for upgrading is because the new Visual editor included with the 2.5 version of WordPress is much more elegant and the results seem to be more reliable. With previous versions of WordPress, when switching from Visual editor to the Code editor (now called HTML editor), the formatting of text might be lost. Sometimes, simply using the visual editor and saving would result in something quite different from what was being displayed. With the Apple Safari browser, it was not possible to edit images using the visual editor. Some features and functions of the visual editor either didn’t work or worked incorrectly. So, it was necessary to use Firefox to manage a WordPress site. Since the visual editor is the main point of interaction for most people managing a configured site, it is important to have it working properly.
Apple Safari Not Working with WordPress 2.5 Version Visual Editor. After the initial upgrade from 2.3.3 to the 2.5 version, trying to use the insert link or insert image buttons in the toolbar did not work. It was necessary to clear the Safari browser cache to resolve this issue.