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: