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Upgrade Tip for WordPress 2.6 – Don’t Upgrade!

·640 words·4 mins
WordPress Technology

I just spent most of today upgrading to WordPress 2.6 platform, which is powering my site.

Our exciting new features are…… well, there aren’t many new features actually. The big change is that I scrapped Categories completely, in favor of Tag Cloud based approach. Now, under each Post title are relevant Tags instead.

The 10 minute upgrade took most of the day. Considering I was still on 2.3 or so, issues were expected, but this image upload issue exceeded all my expectations. Here’s the timeline:

  1. A lot of time was spent reviewing the many Plug-Ins that my site uses or even In-Active ones. I had to decide what to remove forever, and for others I was making sure there isn’t a newer version available that should minimize my chances of incompatibilities. 
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  1. Upload of new WordPress.org PHP and related files, was rather painless. Don’t forget to review additions to wp-config.php in root directory, it needs to be kept, but it has to have additions, and 2.6 had 3 more parameters than my older config. 
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  1. Upgrade of DB itself was easy, don’t forget to backup database before the move!
  2. I quickly found that my Categories got all messed up. In-fact they were there, but without any names. I think it is a result of my having one category with single quote in it (O’Rly). At first I picked up database backup, found what used to be in wp-category table and applied the category names onto records. 
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  1. But that was only half the story, since I used Simple Tags plug-in in the past, I was trying to figure out how to move from those old Tags into the new world. Well, apparently there is a nifty embedded tags importer, thanks to simple tip in FAQ. 
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  1. Once All Tags from old posts were imported/converted and such, I setup a Tag cloud Widget on my sidebar, and made minor change to my Theme to show Tags under posts, instead of Categories. 
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At this point I was sure that Upgrade is done, and I decided to celebrate the success by posting something. Funny thing, the Draft uploaded just fine through my Windows Live Writer, which I often use, but the final Post didn’t want to go up. Kept failing.

Took me a couple of back and forth to realize that the difference isn’t "Draft’ to "Publish", the difference is the fact that I added image, as I often do towards the end of post creation.

Well, long story short, many hours of investigation, logs review, forums checking, later, it looks like there is a freshly minted WordPress bug. Seems that whatever fancy technology generates Thumbnails for uploaded images, is hard-wired to default to /wp-content/uploads directory. Granted that many blogs have their images there, but mine are elsewhere!!

Hopefully this is just a small thing that Matt and Co can work out quickly. So just wait until inevitable 2.6.1 version, like I should have…

Meanwhile, I decided to spice things up just a little bit to celebrate the Upgrade. Presenting Virtual Chat Room, where you can interact with me and/or other visitors of this blog. I know I am not much of an interior decorator, but I will try to improve in the future! Meanwhile, visit the new Chat page and Suggestions Welcome!

PS: Note how there are no images on this post ;-)  Nor can I figure out how to add Tags from Live Writer… As my daughter brilliantly noted: "I thought Upgrade was supposed to improve things, not break them!"

UPDATE: I can not explain it, but today I changed my upload directory back to just say uploads, and it works fine, at least from Online uploader. Perhaps I did something wrong on Sunday, but first, I shall try the live writer next, to confirm that it uploads from there!



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