Unfortunately, after the upgrade, every other form submission on the backend was giving me blank pages and error messages, and I determined that my outdated theme was likely to blame. What’s more, I had foolishly made several customizations to the theme’s CSS, which of course would not be preserved when I upgraded it. Since I always thought that theme was a bit dull, anyway, I figured it would be as good a time as any to search around for a new one. As a side note, the new theme browser/installer in 2.8 made this task incredibly easier than it had been before.

So now we’re rolling along error-free with a new theme and all my customizations safely stashed in the Custom User CSS plugin. I’m still not totally satisfied with this theme (especially the weird fadey drop-down menus) and will probably change it again in the future, but that’s life. On the positive side, the main content area is now just wide enough to squeak a 640-pixel-wide image into.

One of the non-CSS customizations I had made to my old theme was to add several lines of PHP that would prevent my content from being “texturized” – straight quotes replaced with smart quotes, doubled hyphens replaced with real dashes, etc. When I enabled the new theme and the texturization returned, I was surprised to notice that the one thing about it that really annoyed me had apparently been fixed: Straight quotes inside <code> blocks are no longer converted into smart quotes. I’m not sure if this is a fix on the part of the theme or WordPress 2.8 (I don’t see anything in the changelog about it), but either way I’m happy enough to leave the feature turned on.

The one thing that really impressed me about 2.8 is the new syntax-highlighting, line-numbering, generally awesome-looking code editor. This is the first time I’ve seen anything like this, though in retrospect it seems like an obvious idea: If we can already do WYSIWYG editing for normal content, why not apply some nice formatting and colors to code-editing as well? If you’re curious to see what this looks like, the WordPress 2.8 release announcement has a slick video overview that touches on the code editor and various other new features (I recommend watching it, if only to witness the incredibly high production values for it being an announcement of a point release).