Newbie Wordpress Upgraders Watch Out

You may recall from our comments feed of a couple of weeks back that we finally took the plunge and upgradedfrom the Wordpress 2.0.x fork to the 2.1.x version. It all went a lot more swimmingly than I’d expected it to, as it happens, but Sciencetext has only a few plugins running and nothing major to disrupt. Sciencebase in contrast took a little more effort to get going again once I’d deleted all the old files (excepting the wp-content folder, of course).

Here’s a run down of upgrade issues to watch out for when you upgrade a Wordpress installation.

• Missing wp-config.php file. This was easy to fix - I had done a full root directory backup before the upgrade - make sure you do, you will never know in advance which files you may inadvertently delete.
• Plugin compatibility - some plugins simply won’t work when you upgrade, others will somehow render their neighboring plugins inactive. This happened with the Feedburner and Feedburner stats plugins. So, if you’re running those two, or indeed any plugins, double check that your Feedburner redirect is still working and that users can subscribe to your RSS feed.
• Some plugins required prototype.js in the wp-includes/js folder. I believe this file is no longer needed in 2.1.x
• If you modified your wp-db.php file per our earlier posting here, make sure you update that file from your backup too, otherwise database errors will simply spawn the uninformative WP default MySQL error page
• Perhaps the most painful problem was the deprecation of the old links/blogroll tag in WP 2.1.x. After much deliberation, the developers have ditched the old method of blogrolling in favor of an entirely new approach. If you have modified pages or sidebars carrying specific chunks of links, then these will all need modifying to use the new tag. You’ll probably end up with bulleted lists where you don’t want them as well as a few extraneous bullets with no list. This is where the null “title_li” tag will come in handy and a little knowledge of your CSS stylesheet. (More advice on that for those who request it by leaving a comment).

Wordpress upgrading is something that is so easy to defer until a later date, but there are several useful features that make an upgrade worthwhile. Once it is done, you will wonder why you didn’t do it sooner.