To celebrate drew3000.net’s upgrade to WordPress 2.3.1 today, Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez (photographed at left with his posse) has called on oil-rich nations to dramatically reduce what they charge poor countries for the commodity. The poorest countries should only pay about $20 (£9.60) for a barrel of oil compared with current market prices of more than $90, Mr Chavez said. He added that this site’s mid-version update of the popular open source blogging platform provided an excellent platform from which to call on fellow OPEC members to set aside $100bn from oil revenues to improve education and health in poor nations.

We on the Drew3ooo technical team applaud this move by the controversial Bolivarian leader, but would suggest raising the price for oil accordingly on imports to “red” states in the U.S. where President Bush won either popular or electoral votes.

But about the Wordpress upgrade…

Well, enough bug fixes came through to justify updating WordPress to 2.3. I tried out the initial, much-lauded release but it was conflicting with way too much and gave me a headache. And yet, 2.3.1 was not entirely painless. WP gushes that “2.3.1 fixes over twenty bugs.” I’m not sure if that’s something to shout about.

I would like to say that it was my utter zest to keep on the bleeding edge of the latest WordPRess technology, but in fact it was the fact that I was mucking around with the back-end in WordPress’ admin until I broke it and decided that instead of figuring out what i did wrong I might as well just install the latest version. In my defense, I only started mucking around with it because either the plugins Exec-PHP or BDP RSS Aggregator were destroying WordPress’ admin area and I wanted to see which was the culprit and why. I’ve also just recently decided that’s not worth the pain to find out. No php in my posts or page areas. That’s that.

No one actually ever said the internet would make life easier. There is some proof that it’s bad for your eyes and causes weight gain.

A big thanks to Smiths R Us for the very fine plugin Wordpress Upgrade Preflight Check, which I wish I would have known about before upgrading. Still, it’s helped answer a ton of questions. If you’re on WordPress and about to upgrade, this tool is really useful. I used it to quickly find and either upgrade or kill off plugins giving the latest 2.3 too much grief. That’s the upside. The downside is that it was a gory task, leaving much otherwise good php scripting dead on the side of the information superhighway.

For those not up on the tech stuff, WordPress is the platform upon which this and many other wonderful sites are based. Plugins are the groovy little bits of coding that extend what WordPress can do. For more on all this, check out WordPress.org

Now, for the casualties. A lot of plugins out there have been found to be incompatible with WP2.3. I’ve read plugin users and creators complaining about 2.3 changes and WP developers calling those people out for alleged shoddy code or whatever. All in all, a lot of bitching going on over at the forums. I’m sure the answer is somewhere in the middle. WP developers really should have taken into account the widely-used otherwise stable plugins, and maybe done a lot more beta releasing before this. Plugin makers and users need to keep track of things and see if they are still offering or using something that works.

Nearly half the plugins I had going (most still touted on WordPress’ own website) were causing some conflict with 2.3.1., so apparently 20 bugs were not all that was in there. A lot of them, though needed either to be updated, or wiped out and re-installed. The latter is a bit annoying. I have no problem updating something to keep it working with the platform, but the platform itself needs to play nice as well. In all 15 plugins were giving it grief. About eight of them I turnd on and off and then it all sorted out. A couple needed updates and a few either just wouldn’t work or caused the admin side of the blog to stop working.

The majority of problems uncovered by Upgrade Preflight Check involved

1. get_the_title function
2. upgrade-functions.php
3. old category table

From reading the WordPress forums, one gets the idea that there are a number of design themes out there also having some trouble with 2.3, so proceed with caution when “upgrading” if you have one you’ve put a lot of work into. The one drew3ooo is based on, Modicus Remix, works fine, but a number of plugins it came with needed either updating or re-installing before they played nice with 2.3.

Oddly enough, the WordPress Default theme that comes bundled with the most recent release has a get_the_title function error when used.

In the end, for this site, we lay to rest the following:

Live 0.4. Let’s you track visitors in real time. Fun to watch, but no real loss in functionality by not having it. Besides, Google Analytics is more fun.

Ultimate Tag Warrior. WP now comes with Tagging included but I think it might not be as good as UTW right off the bat, and meanwhile I think I’ve lost my old tags which sucks, since that’s become such a core thing. But whatever. Get over it. There are starving people in Sudan.

Wordpress OpenID (+). Yeah, ok. I never really used this. Still, it’s sad.

Others killed: Google Sitemaps, Similar Posts, Simple Forum.

Meanwhile, somehow, WP-Amazon, the most buggy thing I’ve ever installed here works. Go figure.

Update: I’m still getting a Table ‘drewthrz_wrdp1.wp_post2cat’ doesn’t exist error and am now checking to see if Live Archives is the one in conflict.

Update+: Bugger, bugger bugger! It is. There goes the archive page. Fuckers!

Update++: May have a solution. Am currently trying out a fix to Live Archives hatched by the blogger at blog.tinyau.net.

Update+++: That worked for the most part. There remains only one small problem. When deleting a post, the error message given below displays. You have to hit your browser’s refresh button to see the change. Not major, but annoying.

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/drewthrz/public_html/wp-content/plugins/af-extended-live-archive/
af-extended-live-archive-include.php292

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/drewthrz/public_html/wp-content/plugins/af-extended-live-archive/
af-extended-live-archive-include.php465
1 on line on line

After all that, WP 2.3.1 puts us, um, back to status quo (minus a few useful tools) for the most part and I’m wondering if the update was really worth the trouble. WordPress should be a bit more careful, according to this blogger anyway, about what babies get thrown out with the bathwater when creating updates, lest it become an Open Source equivalent to that Redmond, Wash., software company that people love to bitch about. That said, upgrades are a part of internet living and sometimes we have to leave some great tools behind and hope they are one day reborn to work with new coding.

But WordPress ought to have more fixes coming. I’m just wary about trying them. I get tired of the error messages whenever I post. Yes, the open sourciness of it all means that other developers can hop in and fix these things. But 2.3.1 release shows that developers’ work can also be summarily ignored or discarded (which is more like the traditional top-down model of proprietary software companies), which could make some people wonder whether they should waste the time.

The WordPress forums are still currently abuzz with heated arguments and pithy rants from both pissed off users and a little overly defensive developers and, well, a few fixes as well, but not enough for my tastes, so I’m going to lay low for a bit. I’m sure the update was needed, but it was a bit ugly this time around.

Remember everyone; breathe. This internet thing is a total fad.

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