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WordPress 2.3 released, Go Slow
WordPress 2.3 has been released, and I advise everyone to go slow on the upgrading. Make sure you try it out offline first with your theme and plugins before trying to post it live to your site. Anything involving categories or other archive related plugins might very well not work correctly anymore due to the database changes they’ve instituted in this version.
But hey, you now get to play around with tags without a plugin, so it’s got some benefits.
Studies In Frustration: Upgrading
I had one long weekend of frustration. One of my favorite online store site packages, X-cart, was resisting my efforts to run some upgrade scripts to move to the newest version of the software. No matter what I did, X-cart did not see the upgrade package to move from version 4.0.17 to version 4.0.18. I changed every file permission I could think of, moved files all around, and still nothing.
I finally had to start pulling apart the code of the upgrader and the software to figure out why it wasn’t working. After a ton of time and testing I finally discovered the issue: A bug in the upgrade code for this patch was preventing X-cart from seeing the patch as valid. It turns out the coders had only set it to search for the database string for the version as 4.0.17, where if you had ever upgraded the program the string was listed as 4.0.17gold_upgrade…..so the patch would never be visible. To correct this issue you had to edit the database entry in the config table to simply list the current version as the number.
This reminded me of how simple in general it is to upgrade WordPress. Simply overwrite the default files with the new ones and run one simple database upgrade script and you’re done. With WordPress 2.3 being released very soon it’s good that this part of WordPress is easy. Now, making sure your theme and plugins don’t break due to the database changes they’ve done, now that’s not going to be easy…..
AWSOM Archive updated to version 1.2.0
The new version of the AWSOM Archive (formerly called the AWSOM Drop Down Archive) is now available for download. While retaining the default drop down setup of the previous versions, the new version expands the possibilities of usage for the plugin to any type of archive the admin wants to set up. The new version features expanded CSS customization, custom name, custom location placement, and more. You can download the new version from it’s product page at AWSOM.org
WordPress 2.2.3 released, Security update
WordPress 2.2.3 has been released and contains some small bug fixes and security updates. Anyone using the 2.2.x branch should update to this new version. (Please note: 2.2.3 is NOT 2.3 and is not the version of WordPress that will break many older plugins–this is just an update to the existing 2.2 branch–so don’t be afraid to update to this version).
WordPress 2.3 Upcoming Issues
The release of WordPress 2.3 is coming soon (at this time it’s scheduled for late September 2007), and you can expect trouble. While the transition of WordPress 2.0 to 2.1 had issues, and many thought the change from 2.1 to 2.2 was traumatic–that will be nothing compared to the change to 2.3. It turns out that the developers have decided to make some drastic changes to the structure of the database of WordPress, so many older plugins (like ones developed even this week) will probably fail. If a plugin has anything to do with categories it will almost certainly fail, since this area seems to have been hit the hardest with the change.
In their blog the developers have essentially said “if we’re going to make a change, we decided we might as well go for broke”. I don’t doubt that there are good reasons fro the changes, but they have essentially said that they expect things to break and have an “oh well, what to do?” attitude about it. Since most USERS of WordPress don’t follow along on developers discussions, there’s a good shot most of you guys will get caught totally unaware if you upgrade–and half your site stops working. So be careful and test your site offline first if you plan to upgrade to 2.3 when it’s released.
My plugins are mostly unaffected by the changes that are occurring, but I will be releasing an update to the AWSOM Drop Down Archive plugin soon to bring it more into compatibility with some other changes that have occurred.