Meta Problems
Posted on | August 9, 2008 at 7:23 pm | Comments Off
Pet Peeve of the Day: WordPress upgrades.
Every once in awhile, I like to give myself a massive headache and upgrade the Wordpress software that underlies this blog. Actually, I’ve rarely had a problem with the upgrades. It’s usually pretty smooth, but it is time consuming, especially if you’re careful. But this time, I had problems that I don’t think were my fault. I upgraded from WordPress 2.2.2 to 2.6.
The biggest issue I had is that it wiped out all the names and slugs for my post and link categories. The categories were still there, they just had blanks for names and “2-2-2-2-2-2″ etc for slugs. If there’s no name, you can’t edit the name in WordPress. So I had to use PHPMyAdmin and edit the database by hand. Luckily, I had a backup of my database, so I knew which names applied to which category id’s. If you visited my site this afternoon and saw missing categories, that’s what was going on. No idea why that part of the database conversion didn’t work, but it doesn’t look like I was the only one who had that problem with the upgrade.
The other big issue I’m having is that it didn’t do character conversion correctly. Some instances of some punctuation characters, such as single quote, double quote, ellipses, etc got changed in text to unreadable characters. It looks like it was isolated to text that was copied/pasted into blog entries or comments, and luckily not ones that were natively entered using the Wordpress editor. So now I’ve got to go back and clean up all those. If you see something unreadable in an old post or comment, that’s what’s going on.
Okay, I did have one problem that was my fault. I accidentally deleted my wp-config.php file from the server, which is a big no-no in the WordPress world, and that was the one file I didn’t have backed up on my home PC. Luckily I was able to recreate the information in it without a big hassle. And this time I’m backing it up.
Everything else looks to have transferred okay. But if you notice any other weirdnesses, or you can’t post a comment or something, let me know. Thanks.
I’m reserving judgment on the new features of WordPress 2.6 until I have time to check them out properly…
Latre.
Jogged Today: Yes (@ 62°F)
Songs That Came Up On The iPod While Jogging:
- “Laughing” (R.E.M.)
- “Strange Season” (Michael Penn)
- “Crowded Room” (XTC)
- “A Lifetime”* (Better Than Ezra)
- “I Am A Mirror” (Alan Parsons Project)
- “I’m Tired” (Field Music)
* – Interestingly, this song is about hearing an R.E.M. song. Weird that it came up on the iPod on the same day as an actual R.E.M. song.
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “how much rain did lakewood colorado get on august 8th 2008″.