have everyone keep all there valuable items in there inventories and hide some chest full of their other crap so people wont break into houses and steal things again
I don't think it's worth transferring to 1.9 until there is a recommended/stable Bukkit build for it.
I was gonna agree about that, holding off updating the server for 1.9... the only problem is that people will probably update Minecraft regardless, and getting people to roll it back would be problematic.