My Side Door

Wordpress is the software for this blogging platform.  They released their latest version 9 days ago, and I naturally waited for the more experienced bloggers to do the upgrade before I ventured into the craziness.  I figured let someone else be the guinea pigs.  Well, there were enough posts about it for me to get a feel for what to look out for, so I’m giving it a shot.

First I saved off my private content, which turned out to be super easy, with the database backup plug-in that I have.   Then I de-activated all of my plug-ins.  Then I downloaded the new upgraded onto the server, and overwrote my wordpress installation with the new files.  I was supposed to delete everything first, but that seemed a tad risky…I don’t like deleting if I don’t have to. 

Next, I ran the upgrade script which took less than a second.  In fact it was so fast, I thought for sure something didn’t work.  From there, I went back to the plug-ins page and sure enough, I could see one new feature work right away, the plug-ins upgrade alerter.  I got busy downloading all of the upgraded plug-ins, and activating everything that was active before.

As a test I wrote a test post, which immediately failed with this error:

WordPress database error: [Table 'wordpress.wpsteve_categories' doesn't exist]
SELECT c.cat_ID AS ID, MAX(p.post_modified) AS last_mod FROM `wpsteve_categories` c, `wpsteve_post2cat` pc, `wpsteve_posts` p WHERE pc.category_id = c.cat_ID AND p.ID = pc.post_id AND p.post_status = 'publish' AND p.post_type='post' GROUP BY c.cat_id

Ugh. That’s not what I was hoping for.  I went to the Wordpress’ release notes, which stated that the categories table was removed.  This meant the offensive code above surely must have been a plug-in that hadn’t upgraded.  I decided to turn off my 2 sitemap plug-ins, because neither had an available upgrade, and sure enough, I can now save without error.  Now I just need to get a new auto-sitemap generator.

Otherwise, it all looks good.  As a result of the upgrade, I’m finally going to get around to implementing tags, since that was the #1 new feature of Wordpress 2.3, while before you needed a plug-in to get tag support.

Update: The Google Sitemap-XML Plug-in that was giving me grief was updated by the author today.  I’ve downloaded the new version of the plug-in and it seems to be working as exptected.  Nice work.  I think this basically gets me back to even, and only in about an hour.  Not bad, really.

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