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Better Debugging

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:

September 28th, 2007 · Category: Site Stuff, Technology, Web Sites · Tags: , , , , , , , · 7 Comments »

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