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:
When I woke up on Sunday Morning at 3:30, I discovered that there was a new version of Typo out. Anxious to find fixes for the bugs I’d enoutered in version 4, I started reading through the release notes where I discoved that the copy of rails on my server wasn’t compatible with the latest Typo. Worse yet, neither was compatible with the version of Ruby installed.
So, thinking I knew what I was doing, I did the download-configure-make-make install dance for Ruby, readline, gems, rails and typo. With all of that going smoothly, I went for the final step: typo install [directoryname], at which point everything went to hell. It backed up my database, but then modified the original and crapped out. Trying to back out the changes didn’t work. Nor did anything else I tried. The error messages? How about: “unable to find method read!” Yeah, that’s working.
To be honest, I probably screwed it up. In fact, I’m sure of it. Which is why I’m switching to WordPress. Dreamhost’s one-click-install made installation a breeze, and hopefully I’ll figure out how to get my old data transitioned over soon.
I think I have my Dreamhost problems sorted - or at least the MovableType ones. I’ve switched all of the weblogs I maintain (no, really, there’s more going on than you realize) to MovableType 3.17, and after tweaking some templates and losing some features (temporarily), everything seems to be working again.
I’m also trying out other blogging software for my site - I got Typo up and running yesterday, but it wouldn’t import my comments from Movable Type for some reason. I’d like to switch to that since I’d finally get a chance to learn Ruby on Rails, but it’s awfully spartan. I had Textpattern installed on my last host, for testing purposes, and it was fine, but I didn’t feel like learning an entirely new templating language.
I was all set to try out WordPress, but after the link-farming incident, I don’t really trust their dev team. I do like their default template (obviously, and the work Michael is doing on K2 looks good as well. A bit blank, though.
Either way, I have a ton of posts in my head that I’d like to get up (even though my readership has dwindled to 2, and one of those is just me proofreading), and a whole redesign planned in my head. Maybe one of these days I’ll have the time for websites again.