September 28th, 2007 by Jemaleddin Cole

I spent some time this morning trying to upgrade this site to WordPress 2.3. I’m running a whole slew of plugins, and have pretty heavily modified the theme, so I wasn’t very surprised when pretty much nothing worked.

First the Similar Posts plugin made everything die - and I mean everything. I couldn’t even deactivate it through the WordPress interface and had to move it out of the plugins directory. Then I discovered that trying anything to do with comments was spitting out nasty error messages. I could delete comments, but I got an error. I could add comments, but I got an error. I tried disabling all of my plugins, but that didn’t seem to help. I took out a bunch of my theme edits, but that didn’t help.

The most confusing part of the problem was the error message: I was getting two errors, one complaining about the headers already being sent which is often a cookie problem, and the other complaining about not finding the post2cat table that was dropped in the update. From what I can tell, the problem was with the Google Sitemaps plugin, but the Wordpress plugin upgrade page seemed to suggest that 2.7.1 would work. Either way, deactivating the plugin didn’t solve the problem, so I gave up.

I’d really like to see better debugging info from WordPress. PHP has pretty lame error messages to begin with, and it’d be nice if the WordPress team could come up with a better way to deal with errors than to just crap out with the lame PHP messages.

Luckily, Dreamhost has automated database backups that are easy to restore, and their one-click software installer always backs up your files when you perform an upgrade. Even though I couldn’t solve the problem, I was at least able to get things to the way they were before.

For the curious, here are the plugins I use with WordPress:

• Akismet 2.0.2
• All in One SEO Pack 1.2.6.9
• Antispam Collateral Condolences 0.2
• Bad Behavior 2.0.5
• Batch Categories 1.2
• Browser Sniff 1.10
• Bunny’s Technorati Tags 0.5
• Extended Comment Options 1.1
• Google Adsense for Feeds 1.0
• Google Sitemaps 2.7.1
• Head META Description R1.1.2
• Recommend Google Pack 1.2
• Similar Posts 2.1.1 beta
• Text Link Ads 3.0.3
• Ultimate Tag Warrior fin
• WordPress.com Stats 1.1.1
• WordPress DS-Lite Edition 1.0
• WordPress PSP Edition 1.0
• WordPress Wii Edition 1.3
• wp-cache 2.1.1
• WPCandy 1.2

7 Responses to “Better Debugging”

1. I haven’t upgraded yet (got 4 blogs to do) and I’m a little scared tbh.

   — sara September 28th, 2007 at 4:20 pm #

2. Well, when you figure it out how about giving me a little blue “s” to show up in my bookmarks? Like your orange tuberculosis icon.

   — skank September 28th, 2007 at 7:40 pm #

3. @sara: Well, if you do upgrade, make sure to upgrade and then deactivate all of your plugins - especially anything that might have to do with categories. I wasn’t careful enough, it seems.

   @skank: yeah yeah, I’ll try - any fonts you like in particular? I’m thinking Futura….

   — Jemaleddin September 29th, 2007 at 6:38 am #

4. Futura sounds good. Thanks. I’ve been feeling slighted. ;)

   — skank September 29th, 2007 at 8:16 am #

5. It didn’t end up being Futura, but it’s up. :-)

   — Jemaleddin September 29th, 2007 at 7:06 pm #

6. You’re good. Really good. Thanks! It looks great.

   — skank October 2nd, 2007 at 8:31 am #

7. I aim to please.

   No wait, I aim to kill. I try to please.

   — Jemaleddin October 2nd, 2007 at 8:53 am #