I've Been Thinking About This…

Upgraded the blog to WordPress version 2.7 today.

I checked for auto-updaters, in the hope that this would be a no-brainer. Version 2.7 apparently now has one built in, but I had to get to that version first. There is an automatic upgrader plugin (‘wpau’) that is now retired. It officially supported versions from 1.5.2 up to 2.6.1; it unofficially supports through 2.7 … sometimes. Of the 16 comments I looked at: 7 people loved the wpau (although one of them subsequently failed when using 2.7’s updater, and another succeeded by skipping the backup step). 8 people failed with wpau and one person said to do the upgrade manually. It’s hard to see the group being more evenly split!

In the end, I took the painful safe route – I backed up the DB, then the other files, and then followed the steps in the detailed documentation. One minor note: The list of compatible plugins is a long way short of complete. This wasn’t a problem though; I turned on all the other plugins one by one and they all worked fine. I came out all right in the end, with one minor problem: There are three new security variables to be placed in the config file. Installing these meant that I couldn’t log on as the admin, even when I deleted my cookies. So I took the variables back out and everything was OK. There are no instructions for how to get around this issue; stay tuned for the resolution.

Running a quick cross-platform test, I also noticed that Outbrain doesn’t work in Opera, although it is fine in Firefox 3.0 and IE7. Running the error console on Opera showed a lot of width, height and null errors from the page, 3 or 4 of which were from Outbrain (and another 3 or 4 from Amazon) and none of which looked significant. (Interestingly, turning on the FF error console showed a completely different set of errors.)

So: not too bad a trip; nothing major encountered, and the blog is up and running on the latest platform version. And henceforth – automatic updates.

[Update Jan 12, 2009: Found out that Twitter Updater doesn't work anymore, so I have to put out the Twitters by hand. On the good side, I've successfully followed the instructions to set up threaded comments - not that I have that many comments to begin with...]

[Update Jan 13, 2009: Bumped into TwitterPress which supposedly does the auto-notification thingy, so I was going to try that with the next post. However, when I saved this comment, it sent out a tweet. Turns out it works by sending out a Twitter not for the initial publishing of a post but for any update, as long as it hasn't twittered about the post before. So if I update a post (like this one), it Twitters about it (once). Also, although it says it will put out the permalink, it actually puts out the deprecated post ID. So that had to go. I've installed Birdfeeder instead - that seems to be working properly.]

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