Yesterday I updated The S.T.E.A.L. Saga to Wordpress 2.5.1. I thought the upgrade would be painless, but I was wrong. First of all, the auto plugin updater kind of confused between the various plugins, so it marked some as updateable although they weren’t. Then, some plugins (albeit incompatible), disappeared from the plugin list (the fix was downloading a more recent version).
The biggest issue was, however, the mangling of my .htaccess file due to a wrongly-generated permalink rule that was without a trailing slash (/). Such a badly done .htaccess would cause:
- Problems when loading the pages
- Problems with admin panels (no such page errors and the like)
- Most importantly, it would cause an enormous load on the server (and with shared hosting, it is a problem)
It took me at least 30 minutes to find out what the cause was. Removing .htaccess did not help, I had to remove it then change the permalink to the default value, and then change it again. Now it works, but what a bother for a seemingly “simple” upgrade.
I have upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.5. As a result, there are some functions, such as the image gallery, that have been disabled due to the annoying habit of the Wordpress developers of making core changes in very little time.
Please report any problems you find, and notice that although the thumbnails look truncated in the new gallery, the full images are actually displayed correctly. I had to fiddle a bit wit the “new media manager”, not only because it’s in Flash, but because at least on Linux it gives odd results (apparently no one from the WP team bothered to check past Win and OSX?).
After some thoughts, I switched dennogumi.org to the dKret theme. Please report any errors you may find. The header is the default image, but it will be changed soon (hint: Melissa, you already know what to do…).
I’ve recently upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.3. While I’m interested in the new changes this release brings (like tagging support) I question the way the transition to the new version was handled.
In particular, I am referring to the (questionable) idea of breaking the database schema three weeks before the release. Given the amount of breakage that brought upon plugins, it should have been announced at the start of the 2.3 development cycle. Right now, heavily customized installations are a pain to update (that’s why The S.T.E.A.L. Saga is staying on 2.2 for now).
I think the WP guys should look at how bigger projects like GNOME or KDE are handled regarding such aspects. They can’t really expect to break an API every release, can they?
On a related topic, I’m thinking of changing the theme of this blog. Has anyone got any recommendations?
