Having read up on the features of WordPress 2.9 and seen barely a mention of any problems on the main tech sites I subscribe to, I committed a cardinal sin yesterday and updated the new version straight to my two live blog sites. –Top Tip – either wait for the .1 version, or upload to a test site first.
And errors occurred with both sites. With this one, TheWayoftheWeb is seems to be a fairly simple incompatibility with the theme I’ve been running since I launched 18 months ago, which resulted in the sidebars of the design disappearing (But only on the homepage!). Not the worst problem in the world, although rather than rolling back the update to WordPress 2.8, I simply tried a couple of alternatives quickly, and it turns out Cutline works fine for the moment.
The problems on www.140char.com were a little more serious – although the site continued to display all widgets correctly, when I logged into the WordPress dashboard, all plugins had disappeared. No options, no record of the settings, and I couldn’t reinstall because the records for them were still in my WordPress database.
There is a plugin to reset plugins, which may have worked, but that will reset all of the settings and code you may have installed. So instead I decided on a slightly more radical option, logged into the FTP client for my database host, and deleted each plugin individually before reinstalling. The bonus being that there were a couple of items in there that had been de-activated but not deleted so it was due a bit of spring cleaning.
Luckily almost every restored plugin instantly recovered all settings and data, so I didn’t lose any comments, for example. The only problem is that one of the major plugins that I would assume a lot of people use, Feedburner Feedsmith, isn’t compatible with WordPress 2.9. As a plug in it redirects all RSS feeds and links to your Feedburner version allowing tracking etc, and without it, anyone trying to subscribe gets sent to the unformatted standard XML which I can’t track. Which is a bit annoying, and by the time I’d got to that stage it was way past the time for sleep, so I’ll have to try an alternative plugin today.
On the bright side, nothing was lost that couldn’t be recovered, and it’s a good reminder not to slip into just clicking auto-update as soon as I see the option. But it does make me wonder why WordPress don’t develop an easy solution.
The easy solution for upgrades WordPress should include:
There are already options for easy backup of both your database and files. And the one-click automatic upload makes things easier if you don’t want to do everything manually.
But…
Where on earth is the one-click option to downgrade to a previous version if necessary? I know each version fixes bugs and security risks, so there are inherent problems with downgrading, but until yesterday, I was quite happily running 2.8.6.
And it would solve the major issue with WordPress updates – the compatibility with 100s of themes, 100s of plugins, 10s of hosts etc. No setup is identical (Even when I run two sites with the same design, same plugins, on the same hosting provider there are still different problems etc), and WordPress can’t control this. But they can offer an easy rollback to a workng version if there’s a problem. It makes the whole set-up more stable, and doesn’t require a manual re-install.
Episode Blog: A New Beginning:
Fortunately I’d planned to revamp my three sites anyway this Christmas (Yes, I said three – there’s a new one coming for the New Year!), so it’s not all bad news. TheWayoftheWeb will continue as a personal commentary/memory aid/guide to social networks, marketing, mobile, videogames, technology and the media industry. So still scatterbrained.
But www.140char.com will be evolving into more co-ordinated project to effectively cover microblogging across Twitter, Plurk, Tumblr, Posterous etc in a better way. Meanwhile my new project will launch soon and it’s aimed at a very specific area which it may be possible to monetise fairly effectively.
So the forced change of theme ties in with experimenting with new layouts and tools anyway – expect to see a heck of a lot more changes in the next fortnight as I get everything ready and in place for 2010!
