I upgraded a test blog to WordPress 2.2 yesterday morning, and then–because it’s not really a test blog, like most development sites I actually have a use for it, like, um, a meeting with a church web committee tomorrow evening–found myself in conniptions dealing with upgrade aftermath–nothing huge, but it ate several hours.
Overall, the upgrade should go fine, but my suggestions follow (several from WordPress itself, others cobbled together from other blogs as well as experience).
Before upgrading…
- If your ISP offers “one-click upgrade,” STOP. Don’t just press that button! Read the WordPress upgrade instructions end-to-end and then proceed with caution.
- Backup your data. (Again, when are we going to see cron-operated data backup built into WP?) Ok, I admit, the test blog has about five posts, most from content copied and pasted from Amazon and Wikipedia, so I didn’t do this. But I guar-an-tee I’m going to do a belt-and-suspenders backup before Free Range Librarian is upgraded.
- Disable all plugins. Wonky things might happen if they aren’t disabled before you upgrade. It might be ok (it was for me), but on my live blog, I wouldn’t take the chance. That’s probably the biggest error I made in merrily pressing the upgrade button before reading instructions.
- Check the list of incompatible plugins.
- Uninstall the Sidebar Widgets plugin (don’t just deactivate it; remove it from the plugins directory–I say that from both research and experience). Widgets are now integrated into WordPress, and the plugin is incompatible and will cause conflicts. (Note: if you really want to keep using the Sidebar Widgets plugin, there is a plugin for disabling the new integrated WordPress Widgets. But I would guess that down the road we’ll all be moving to WordPress Widgets, so that’s a stopgap.)
- Be aware that your theme may not work right after upgrade. I could not get “andrea09” to work with the new Widget structure; some of my widgets wouldn’t display. In fact, I struggled to find a three-column fluid widget-compatible theme that would work correctly with one other crucial plugin, the Event Calendar; I have kind of a kludge that doesn’t look quite right, and I’m too design-naive to dare touch the CSS. (A church website without an event calendar is a non-starter.) Suggestion to People Like Me: have a backup theme or two hip-pocketed.
- I also found that I learned more from searching the WordPress support forums than from the WordPress documentation, which in places falls behind WordPress reality… poor little free kittens, starving for food!… and that the WordPress site is so busy that I had to stop and restart searches frequently.
Anyway, a nice upgrade, All Should Go Well, WordPress rocks, blah blah blah… but don’t assume you can do this on a coffee break and come back to presto-changeo happy new bloggyness. It’s an upgrade, and Things Can Happen.
Posted on this day, other years:
- Historic districts - 2019
- New job, Community Librarian, Equinox, Woohoo! - 2008
- Eep! - 2006
- Marty Lurie Hits One Out of the Park - 2005
- Patriot Act Presentation Updated - 2004
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The inclusion of widgets into the WordPress core also causes a problem with the beta releases of the popular and powerful K2 theme, which integrates a different, more flexible, widget handling system.
The solution for now involves a small plugin that disables wordpress 2.2’s built in widgets: http://getk2.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4143
Other than that, my upgrade went smoothly, helped by the fact that I didn’t use a one-step upgrade.
Yeah, in theory I should love one-click installs, but they make me uneasy. If I could handle Movable Type upgrades for close to four years, WP can’t be that daunting.
[…] WordPress 2.2 upgrade caveats – this guy’s upgrade didn’t go over so smoothly, and he had to spend several hours fixing things up. This post has a good list of things you should make sure to do before upgrading, including “having a backup theme or two hip-pocketed.” […]
It’s amazing to me that a blogging tool that is in use by as many people as WordPress can get away with still doing this kludgey form of upgrading. I’m working on it today and the directions don’t even really make sense. “upload it to the WordPress directory, overwriting all the files that exist there only after you have delete the old files, which is explained as follows (do not overwrite your wp-content directory or wp-config.php).” What? I’d have more faith in the tool — which I otherwise love — if they would at least proofread their upgrade directions. For every sinlge person who comes through this thinking “computers are hard, blogging is hard”, I shake my fist at WordPress. It doesn’t need to be like this.
Here’s my guess: the uber-gurus don’t need written directions, and the one-click-install people ignore directions. So that leaves the QA for directions to savvy, smart people such as yourself, left wading through instructions that seem written in lolcatlish.
It’s this bit-of-slipshoddiness that can make OS an unexpectedly hard sell. The last mile is crucial… and you *know* it will work and you *know* it’s a good product, but it lacks the hospitality and transparent trustworthiness a product needs… that iPod-ish “I luv this thing!” experience. There are library parallels here, of course 🙂
Wow – you made it into David Weinberger’s blog. Way to go!