Wordpress 2.3 Upgrade
A little while ago WordPress 2.3 came out, so I decided to attempt the Wordpress 2.3 upgrade on a few of my blogs.
There are a number of features I wanted to try out and we have a policy of always keeping to the latest version.
With this release there are also a number of new features that looked interesting including:
- Tagging support which allows tags as well as categories to be allocated to posts.
- Upgrade notification of plugin and Wordpress upgrades. Not so worried about WordPress as this is well publicised but getting notified about plugin upgrades is really useful
- URLs have been tweaked to make them cleaner for search engines
- WYSIWYG editor has more features.
The team at WordPress make a few suggestions about preparing for an upgrade. They are:
- Back up your blog. Here is the Codex page with a few different methods.
- Check for the latest versions of your plugins. Here’s a list of known compatible and incompatible plugins with 2.3, Google Sitemaps seems to be one causing a lot of issues. (Forum thread.) Upgrading might get you cool new features anyway. Don’t forget about the plugin directory.
- Read up on how to modify your theme to add tag support.
- Consider switching your install to use Subversion to make updating ultra-easy.
Having done a few upgrades now, the number one issue to be checked is plugin compatability.
If you don’t check your plugins and one isn’t compatable it will either shut down your site or more curious will shut-down admin access.
So, I’d suggest checking the plugins, then disabling them before upgrading.
Once the upgrade is done bring them back one at a time.
By bringing them back one at a time, if there is a problem you know which plugin caused it. Then you can just FTP into the /contents folder and delete the offender to get up and going again.
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I’ve been considering making the upgrade to 2.3 on a few of my sites as well. I’d really like to get that tagging feature up and running. Thanks for the caveats, I never would have thought to disable the plugins first. Let me give it a try right now.
I too have been thinking about upgrading but two years ago i upgraded one of my blogs and lost all my previous posts in the process, that was not a good week. I was gutted.
As they say “once bitten, twice shy”, so be careful and make sure you back up all your posts.
Good call Sean…I’m gonna back up everything before I do it. I’m stoked about the upgrade though.
I’m always backup (or so I tell myself) programs and data before upgrading to the next version. Wordpress is a sweet tool and hopefully all turns out well.