Wordpress 2.2 Upgrade Fun

Tech

By Dan ⋅ May 18, 2007 ⋅ Post a comment

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ITF just got some Wordpress 2.2 “love”, and reacted badly.

Initially I couldn’t log in, and when I finally resolved that little problem all my sidebar widget content had disappeared. Which is, frankly, bloody annoying.

It’s great that Automattic released the Widget functionality way back when. It’s great that the Wordpress community decided to run with that, and create their own plugins. What’s not great, is that the latest Wordpress release essentially ignored all the Widget work I’d done, broke the key Widget plugin I used, and left me having to rebuild everything.

With 2.2, Wordpress bundles the Widget functionality in its “core”, which in itself isn’t a bad thing. But if a fundamental change like that is going to be made, you expect a slightly better upgrade path. Particularly as Automattic created the original Widget plugin themselves!

The 2.3 release promises to pull tagging into the Wordpress core. Which almost certainly means it will introduce a whole raft of similar upgrade problems. Has the time come to move ITF away from Wordpress? Maybe…

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Tags: 2.2, Automattic, Widgets, WordPress

Discussion

Comments for “Wordpress 2.2 Upgrade Fun”

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K.G. Schneider 1 year ago 1 point
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Hey, you-me both, except I tried it on a test blog first. Um, how do I get the widgets to work again..?

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http://freerangelibrarian.com

Dan 1 year ago 1 point
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I had to recreate them all. I went into the database, pulled out the old code, then pasted that into a set of new Widgets.

There's a bug in 2.2 that prevents PHP code working in Widgets too. Have a search on the Wordpress forums for "php widget", apply the fix to widgets.php, then use the ExecPHP plugin to recreate any php using Widgets you might have.

You'll also need to remove the old Widgets plugin.

I'd use the WP-Admin pages to copy everything out of your Widgets, upgrade, then recreate them.

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http://www.istherefood.com

Halina 1 year ago 1 point
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Hi

Oh, it's not just me... I've just went through the same thing as you, with not being able to come into admin at all. Downgraded back to 2.1.3 and that looks fine for now.

I very much appreciate you sharing this...
I wonder if I maybe should wait until the next release of Wordpress? I really don't want to mess up my installation, especially as I'm not into .php

What do you think?

Thanks!

Halina

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Halina 1 year ago 1 point
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p.s. Couldn't wait... :-)
This time the upgrade went just fine.
I use The Widgetize Anything plugin to create php widgets and that works OK.

I still love Wordpress...

:-)

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K.G. Schneider 1 year ago 1 point
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I found that deleting the widget plugin and finding a new theme was all I really needed to do. It was just more of a change than I bargained on at the time, but it's all good... WP still rocks!

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Dan 1 year ago 1 point
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Glad you both got it working. Yes, I had to remove the old Widget plugin too; I was going to mention that ;)

I still love WP - it's the best of its class. But I dread 2.3 - the tagging changes are going to hurt, I just know it.

Still, pain of upgrading to 2.3 versus pain of migrating away from Wordpress...2.3 probably less work.

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K.G. Schneider 1 year ago 1 point
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Well, where would we go? :-) b2evolution is awful. Movable Type is moribund. that leaves.. WordPress!

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