Upgrading Wordpress 2.0.x to 2.3.x
You might (or might not) have noticed. Just recently I’ve upgraded my wordpress installation from the 2.0 to the 2.3 branch. Branch? Well, using subversion is much easier to keep you installation up-to-date. Usually you do a “svn up” and you have all the new fixes applied to your installation. Well, of course the move from 2.0 to 2.3 wasn’t as easy as a “svn switch”. Especially when you have a couple of plugins and even your own theme. So I did the backup. Disabled the plugins. Did the subversion checkout. Then copied my theme, my plugins and the configuration over and fired up the admin page. Database upgrade – done. At least for the core system. But now comes the fiddling.
So I’ve turned on one plugin at a time. When you hit this error
WordPress database error: [Table 'wordpress23.wp_post2cat' doesn't exist]
it means that you need to upgrade your sitemap plugin. Now the biggest change surely was the new native tagging system. I have been a big fan of UltimateTagWarrior but now 2.3 has native tag integration. (Yay! Took how long?) The import was straight forward to do from the management interface. But of course I had to adjust my theme that depended on the UTW functions. The good new is Christine Davis (the author of UTW) provided a plugin that serves as a compatibility layer. So you can keep using the UTW syntax and the plugin calls are mapped to the native tagging system. (Also grab the tag management plugin!) Unfortunately it’s still beta and I had to change the _getRelatedTags() function to return an empty array if no tags were given.
function _getRelatedTags($tags) {
if (!$tags) return array();
// get posts that match all tags.
After that the posts and the cloud was showing up fine but the associated tags were still missing below the blog entries. After some research I found that I had to change the main loop in the theme from
if ($posts) : foreach ($posts as $post) : start_wp();
to
if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post();
In general I am still a bit skeptical about the upgrade. Once all plugins where turned on I’ve hit an out of memory failure and had to increase the memory size in the php.ini
memory_limit = 16M
So what’s new? At the downside wordpress 2.3 seems to need more memory. On the upside it finally comes with proper Atom 1.0 support now. But after that the upgrade was not very exciting in terms of new features. Was more to keep up-to-date with the latest fixes and security improvements. *shrug*