Well, Dreamhost is upgrading PHP on all their machines over the next few days/weeks, and one of the issues with the upgrade is that versions of WordPress less than 2.1 will be broken. So, they suggest two possible fixes; either upgrade your WordPress installation to 2.1 or higher, or downgrade from PHP5 to PHP4. Turns out that all the sites I have WordPress running on are using PHP4 already, so I didn’t have to do anything. But looking through, there’s some new features and functions of WordPress 2.1 that would (or could) be nice. Only problem is, there’s a lack of information about what plugins or themes will be broken after the upgrade. So instead of upgrading a site to find out things don’t work, I’m going to setup a test site running WordPress 2.1, and install all the plugins and themes that I use elsewhere to see that it’s running properly. Since Dreamhost makes it simple to setup subdomains, and it doesn’t cost anything, this seems like a simpler solution than upgrading one of the sites I maintain and finding out things are broken – and I might be able to find fixes for the problems and get things running anyway, and either submit patches upstream or at least know what needs to be changed on the sites so that they’ll work after the upgrade.
Of course, the data center that houses a good chunk of their servers is going down this evening for about 5 hours, so who knows how much of this work I’ll get done before the connection to the machine goes bye bye. 😛