The Lair of the Pythia

Well, I’m upgraded, and so far it hasn’t been too painful.

I decided not to dive straight in because some of my web sites rely heavily on plugins and I wanted to be sure they’d be OK. I’m still not 100% confident, but we have progress.

Priority #1 was Bad Behavior, which the plug-in compatibility list originally listed as problematic. Someone did publish a fix, but I decided to wait for Michael Hampton just in case, and very soon he came through with a new version.

Also a firm requirement on some of my sites was the LiveJournal Cross-Poster. That also has issues, and doesn’t appear to be being maintained by the original author. Thankfully the fix posted here appears to work. However, this does raise a wider issue about upgrading. Generally I upgrade by simply replacing files, but it is clear from that issue that sometimes whole files of WordPress code get deprecated. It would be nice to know what they are so we can remove them. (Yes, I know, I should research it myself and post it to the Codex.)

The only other issue I have had so far relates to a couple of sites that use derivatives of Sadish Bala’s Mistylook theme. Under IE 6 the sidebar drops down to the bottom of the page when you upgrade to 2.5. Other browsers (including IE 7) appear to be fine. Shaving a few pixels off the width of the sidebar div fixed the problem, though I did have one bizarre moment when I had to take off one more pixel because what worked on my test server did not work with the same browser when I sent it live.

(By the way, the browser archive at evolt.org is a wonderful resource when you have problems like this.)

I haven’t yet had a chance to check any of the new features of 2.5, so there is likely to be another post in a day or two, but I do know that not having the categories list easily available on the right is a major annoyance right now. I guess I’ll get used to it, but I foresee a lot more posts in which I forget to set any categories.

One of the great things about running Wordpress-based web sites is that when you want to do something different you can often find exactly what you want thanks to someone’s neat plugin. I’ve written a few myself by now, though nothing that is worth issuing publicly as they are all pretty specialized. However, I’ve also make good use of other people’s work, and it is about time I gave some public thanks, so here goes:

• All of my blogs rely on Michael Hampton’s fabulous Bad Behavior for protection from spam;
• Many of the people I interact with won’t use any form other blogging other than LiveJournal, so I am indebted to Evan Broder, whose LiveJournal Cross-poster works perfectly and does everything I want; and
• One of my sites is making liberal use of Lester Chan’s WP-Polls, and that is also doing a fine job.

Thank you, guys. You’ve been a great help.

One of the less elegant things about open source software is the upgrade process. Because systems like Wordpress are so dependent on third party themes and plugins, it is inevitable that any “breaking” release is going to cause havoc. And any problems are likely to be exaccerbated by the fact that so many of the users have little or no programming skills.

Wordpress 2.3 looks like it has suffered in this way. In the first few days after it came out there was a rash of complaints about broken plugins and themes. A lot of these were apparently due to people making raw SQL calls in themes, which rather boggled me, but again what can you expect with so many inexperienced developers involved.

Plugins had problems too, because 2.3 changed the database schema (surely it should have been called 3.0 in that case?). Those that still have active support have now mostly been updated, but there do appear to be a few weird things still happening.
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