Wordpress 2.3 Preparation

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Wordpress 2.3 is going live any day now. I upgraded to Release Candidate 1 yesterday afternoon. If you tried to visit and saw hundreds of error messages, sorry about that. I wanted to get it done while traffic was still high to give it a real stress test. The only problem I ran into was an incompatible plugin (Which was already on the list) and a couple of theme oddities that were easy to fix. Not only am I happy with the upgrade process, but I’m actually pleasantly surprised by a small performance increase. Immediately before the upgrade, page loads were taking five to seven seconds over a test of a few dozen reloads. Immediately after the upgrade, average page loads were taking only three to five seconds. Thanks to my previous article about tagging, traffic has been very high all weekend, far more so than usual, so seeing a small performance increase, while probably not statistically significant, is still nice.

My new theme is DONE! It’s uploaded and ready to go. I could switch to it at any second now. I haven’t done so because of the huge number of first-time visitors I’m still seeing right now… my theme works fine on my LAMP (Linux+Apache+MySQL+PHP) server at home, but I’d rather not activate it while traffic is at an all-time high.

I’m not sure I like the logo I created for myself. Any graphic artists want to whip up a simple “Aiming for Independence” logo and send me a proposal? I’m certainly willing to pay; mostly I just haven’t wanted to go to the Digital Point forums and wade through hundreds of messages to find a logo artist who is talented, reliable, and not already grossly overworked.

I also still haven’t done much testing with other browsers and resolutions. For example I just noticed that the header looks terrible in IE6. IE6 insists on adding padding to a DIV where was padding was specifically set to 0. Why? I have no idea.

AWStats and Google Analytics don’t tell me which version of IE people are using, so I have to assume that around 25 to 50% of the IE users are still using 6.x. Of course, I have VERY web-savvy visitors, of whom only about 16% are still using any version of IE. Do I care about the IE6 users? Sure. I care enough to do this:

Seriously, it’s almost 2008. What’s the copyright date on IE 6? 2004! Even if you love Internet Explorer, at least upgrade to IE7!

Back to Wordpress. The Wordpress Codex has a good list of preparation points. They link to my article on tags, which is still awesome, but there is more to the new version than just tags.

My first piece of advice is to make sure you upgrade or disable the Google Sitemaps plugin! This is the one that caused me so many problems yesterday. After upgrading, I noticed that pretty much any reference to comments resulted in SQL errors. I first tried simply disabling all comments-related plugs, but nothing changed. I ended up designing a full regression test (My Six Sigma instructor would be so proud) and going through almost a full iteration before realizing it was the sitemap plugin causing ALL of my problems. Who would have thought that the sitemap generator would break comments? I would have known if I’d read the compatible plugins list more closely. I don’t know what I was thinking… I mean, I even edited the list last week, so I knew it was there, and didn’t bother to check it.

Don’t be an idiot like me. Check the list. Print it out and make sure your plugins are not going to break your blog when you upgrade.

If you run into problems and disabling plugins doesn’t seem to help, you may need to go an extra step. Some plugins, Google Sitemaps included, will continue to cause problems even if you deactivate them. Rename your WP-CONTENT\Plugins directory to Plugins2 or something easy, refresh your plugin administrative page, then rename your Plugins2 directory back to to Plugins and refresh the admin page again. Then, carefully, reactivate your plugins one at a time, testing whatever was broken after each step. It may not be the most efficient way to test, but this will eventually let you find the plugin that is causing you problems.

Backup your database! Wordpress 2.3 includes schema changes, so your database will be modified. If your blog is really large or valuable, consider calling your host provider and asking them to make a backup of your MySQL database. They should be able to do it right away. While it’s normally safe to assume your provider does a nightly tape backup, it never hurts to ask for a little extra safety.

Most of us are just fine with using the Export feature to backup our content. Within the Wordpress administration menu, click MANAGE, then EXPORT. Go through the steps to download your blog contents as an XML file. If something goes horribly wrong during the upgrade process, you can IMPORT this file into a fresh Wordpress install to get back your users, pages, articles, and comments.