As some of you have sure noticed, i upgraded to WP2.5 yesterday. While the upgrade of WordPress itself went relatively smooth.

But then the problems started. After the upgrade i had a look at the homepage and there were no stories to see. I immediately suspected the plug-ins. After disabling all plug-ins the stories were there again, hence the suspicion was right.

I only installed and activated a few plug-ins:

Ultimate Tag Warrior

for tagging the posts,

Spam Karma

for catching spam,

TinyMCE advanced

for enhanced editing

Ted Fox’s plugin for

changing the thumbnail size

the category visibility plugin

for excluding the automated posts from del.icio.us from the frontpage and the feeds.

Since WP2.5 should include the functionality of of UTW and the changing the size i could do without them. But first i had to figure out how to convert the UTW Tags. The respective Import > Ultimate Tag Warrior command did work seamlessly for importing the tags. Since i haven’t uploaded any images, i couldn’t check if the included WP2.5 functionality is equivalent to the plug-in functionality. We’ll see.

Unfortunately there is no officially approved Spam Karma 2 for WP2.5. But i hope that the version i’m using right now is continuing to work as effectively as it did, this blog could not live without it. And no Akismet is not considered an option, i like to have this blog self-hosted and not dependent on third-party services for mission critical parts. But i think it is fairly save to bet that there are no changes in WP2.5 that affect Spamm Karma 2.

That leaves the category visibility plugin and TinyMCE Advanced. I used the auto-upgrade option for TinyMCE Advanced (first time i’ve seen this). This lead to a state where i was simply not able save a post. Everytime i tried to save the post, i got the “Do you really want to leave this page, you’ll lose all your changes, ..” pop up alert. Since i’m not dependent on the added functionality of TinyMCE Advanced, i keep it deactivated for now and have a look into it later.

The category visibility plugin does not work with WP2.5, as the category and tag system has been changed . It was also the most likely suspect for the homepage not displaying any post. I then looked for an upgraded version, and had to find out that the orginal author abandoned development, and the patch for WP2.3 he linked from his site went out of business too. Hence i had to leave it with all categories enabled on both the frontpage and the feeds for the time being. I’m not sure if this bothered you or just reminded you that there is also a DailyDeli category :-). I finally found a version of that plugin that seems to work with WP2.5. Hence the dailyDeli posts should be removed from the FrontPage and the feeds. If would like to have the DailyDeli posts included in the feeds please tell me.

All in all WP upgrades are IMHO too much hassle. This starts with the fact that i don’t understand why plugins and themes are located below wp-content and the whole structure of WP is not very upgrade friendly, Then there is no support for easily detecting which versions of the plugins are compatible with the new version etc. Automattic should definitely have a look at Typo3 how they handle this. For example, this is the layout of the typo3 root directory:

-rw-r--r-- 1 p34755284 ftpusers    46 Sep  7  1999 clear.gif
drwxr-xr-x 8 p34755284 ftpusers    97 Nov 20  2005 fileadmin
-rw-r--r-- 1 p34755284 ftpusers   764 Apr 18  2003 index.html
lrwxrwxrwx 1 p34755284 ftpusers    18 Jan  7 01:36 index.php -> tslib/index_ts.php
lrwxrwxrwx 1 p34755284 ftpusers    12 Jan  7 01:36 media -> tslib/media/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 p34755284 ftpusers    17 Jan  7 01:36 showpic.php -> tslib/showpic.php
lrwxrwxrwx 1 p34755284 ftpusers    16 Jan  7 01:36 t3lib -> typo3_src/t3lib/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 p34755284 ftpusers    16 Jan  7 01:36 tslib -> typo3_src/tslib/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 p34755284 ftpusers    16 Jan  7 01:36 typo3 -> typo3_src/typo3/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 p34755284 ftpusers    32 Jan 25 08:20 typo3_src -> ../../code/typo3/typo3_src-3.8.1
drwxr-xr-x 3 p34755284 ftpusers  4096 Aug 24  2007 typo3conf
drwxr-xr-x 6 p34755284 ftpusers 16384 Mar 12 14:34 typo3temp
drwxr-xr-x 8 p34755284 ftpusers  4096 Nov 20  2005 uploads

What at first sight looks like an awful lot of unnecessary symbolic links, is actually a clever scheme that allows to upgrade to a new version of Typo3 with pointing a single link: typo3_src to a different directory while keeping all the configuration data and extensions in cleanly separated in typo3conf and all the uploaded content also in separated containers, e.g. fileadmin

Update:

Looks a lot that the WordPress Automatic Update plugin would have saved me a lot of trouble. I just noticed that i forgot to include the Google Analytics tracking code after updating the themes for WP2.5

Is there a plugin for inserting the GA tracking code?