..I just upgraded WP and need to test a few things. Since I need to test a post, I figured I’d put something funny in it…
Well worth the 30 seconds to watch.
Archive for January, 2008
I’ve been assisting folks on the WordPress Support Forums for months, but have hit it more heavily recently. I’ve also helped others in the past with all sorts of things to include Mambo, Joomla, PHPNuke, etc. One thing that amazes me is that people really don’t use the tools that are out there to help with weird odds and ends. So, to help others to see what they’re missing, I’m showing what I use:
I’ve been volunteering with a group of people that serve my community and have been beefing up their WordPress Mu site. In the process, I’ve been doing a lot more research about WP Plugins, themes, etc.
I’ve heard about Themes for the Admin interface, but had never played with them until today. In true form of using a CSS file as a Template Engine (who would have thought?!), all thats needed is a simple plugin for the Admin Theme I’m using: WP Tiger Administration.
Let me tell you, I’m impressed - damn impressed.
This nice, crisp, theme is so much nicer on the eyes, but only if you use FireFox and other CSS2 compliant browsers (that means IE users will see the default Admin page).
This really makes me wonder why Admin themes are not as popular as outside themes. I’m actually considering theme’ing the Mu backend for my volunteer project because of how much more professional it looks. Try it out, have a little fun. Who knows, you might spend more time blogging than you did with the older theme. Kudos to Steve Smith…
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.
I had to laugh this morning when I logged into WordPress and actually noticed something from Matt’s blog mentioning ThinkGeek. It seems, I’m not the only one that thinks their website is clunky and outdated.
It’s bad when customers complain, it’s really bad when someone as popular as Matt complains…
I’ve always found the Wishlist concept to be cool, especially as Amazon implements it. I love it when the developer of a plugin or software I use links to their Wishlist because then I can buy them something personal, it seems less crude than a Paypal donate link where you’re putting an explicit price on things.
The other day Kent Brewster found a JS problem on WordPress.com. I was browsing his FAQ and saw this: “My ThinkGeek Wish List is always open.â€
If you click that link, you’ll see in red letters: “To shop from this wishlist, please add items to your cart using this form only! Otherwise, your gifts will… Read More
