There are a lot of posts online about about the newest version of WordPress killing Categoris, links, etc.
I got heavily involved in one such post and decided to pull some old backups of Lost into my test box and upgrade back and forth. Needless to say, I couldn’t replicate the damn issue. I went from 2.1.x to 2.3.2 with some fatal errors (it pretty much freaked because I use XAMP locallly), but my DB stayed the same.
First, anyone that complains should have a backup of their files and DB. If you didn’t backup, it’s your own fault. WP Documentation even tells you to do this first.
What Are The Symptons?
When you first upgrade, you may notice Categories, Pages, Links (Blogroll) all gone. Some people, such as myself, noticed smaller changes like a Category magically being renamed to “Blogroll”.
Whats Causing This?
I’ve read that somewhere between 2.1 and 2.3, there was a table change, but the upgrade process seems to handle this issue just fine. On top of this, I’ve personally gone from 2.1 through 2.3 (10+ times) with Categories intact. I’ve also seen cases of developers helping people through the process and things work fine when they’re being helped.
So, what happened then? Honestly, my idea is that people are rushing the installs. They’re not disabling the Plugins, they’re not performing backups and they’re overwriting files instead of deleting the old and replacing them with new.
There was one install where I could get WordPress to lose categories, but it was specifically due to a permissions issue with a database. I pretty much locked a user down to 4 basic permissions and everything choked as expected.
