The dust settles on a blog upgrade
As I wrote yesterday, I’ve upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5. I’d resisted this for a while, because I knew it would bring certain issues. I didn’t want to deal with it until other projects reached a natural break…
Much has been said about the inadequate security of old versions of WordPress. It was even announced that Technorati will not index vulnerable blogs. I decided therefore to bite the bullet and open the can of worms (mixed metaphor intended).
I was using WordPress 2.1, so the first step was to alter my database encoding. As touched upon in a previous post called “UTF-8 text encoding and self-hosted PHP / MySQL web applications”, versions prior to 2.2 created database tables using the Latin-1 character set and the latin1_swedish_ci collation.
Wordpress have a codex page about this issue, but more importantly there is a database converter plugin that does all the hard work for you. After backing up my files and data I offered a prayer to any blogging god that might be listening and pushed the button. It worked perfectly.
The next step was to go through the standard WordPress upgrade procedure. I transferred my theme and re-applied my modifications to wp-includes/widgets.php. Some CSS tweaks were necessary because 2.5 created different selectors in my sidebar, but I expected this.
I use very few plugins. Here they are:
- Google Analytics and Sociable plugins by Joost de Valk
- FeedSmith, originally by Steve Smith, now maintained by Feedburner
The other major step was because of the Google Analytics plugin. It uses the new ga.js tracking code, so the tags that I’d placed around my site had to change.
For example, where you might have tagged a link:
onclick="javascript:urchinTracker ('/download/my ace ebook');"
… you now have to tag it:
onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/download/my ace ebook');"
A bit of a chore to fix, but it’s not something you have to do every day. It can be handled with a simple find/replace.
My jury is out on the new WordPress interface, famously redesigned by Happy Cog. It has a more inviting colour palette, but some users have already complained that common tasks are now more clunky than before. I already miss having a list of my drafts at the top of the “Write” page.
Time will tell whether I prefer it to Steve Smith’s WP Tiger Administration.
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