Problems With WordPress 2.9 Upgrade

Written by Costa on December 20, 2009 - 10 Comments
Categories: Wordpress Themes

WordPress 2.9 in it’s core form should not pose any problems when you use it for a new blog with no third party addons. It is only when you have been blogging for sometime and have added lots of different Themes, plugins or whatever to make your blog better that you will start getting problems when you upgrade.

I too have had my fair share of frustrations when any major WordPress upgrade comes along. It was worse some years ago when the automatic upgrade function has not been made available with WordPress. We had to manually download each new version and do the upgrading ourselves. Lots who was careless, lost their whole blog in the process because they overwrote their wp-contents file. It was really hellish upgrading then.

Thing are tons better now. An upgrade takes less than 5 seconds and we do not have to worry about overwriting any crucial files. The only major issue is with plugins. My friend, Mitco who runs a sports blog had to spend more than a few hours in WordPress hell after the upgrade before he finally found the culprit to be a plugin that he has been using.

The funny thing is, I too am using the same plugin in a couple of my other blogs and when I upgraded, I did not face any problems. My guess is, it has something to do with the Theme that he is using. Some plugins do not liase with the Theme once there has been some changes in the core framework.

When You Face Problems With WordPress 2.9 Do Not Panic.

The most basic advise you find in WordPress Support is, de-activate all plugins and backup your database. Though the automatic upgrade function makes sure all conflicting plugins cannot be activated once you upgrade, it is still better to do it manually. The plugin might not conflict with WordPress 2.9, but it still might run into problems with your Theme.

If you get errors after the upgrade, even with all your plugins deactivated, change to the default WordPress Theme. If changing to the default takes care of the errors, then your Theme is not compatible with WordPress 2.9.

You can wait for 2 things if you still want to use your Theme or the conflicting plugin. Either wait for an upgrade for your Theme or wait for the upgrade for the plugin. There is nothing much you can do. If the errors are universal or too common, I am very sure WordPress will issue a patch for it in the next few days.

Touch wood, I have not met with any problems whatsoever and I have upgraded all my blogs. Maybe that’s because I am using Premium Themes for all my blogs. Some are running on Thesis, while some are using Themes from Elegant Themes. These Themes are robustly coded and can withstand many future upgrades.

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Article by Costa Fong

@costafong

Who loves to mod and mess up WordPress Themes.

Costa has written 557 articles here. Some are awesome, some are lame.

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10 Responses to “Problems With WordPress 2.9 Upgrade”

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Mitko

December 20, 2009 at 5:59 pm

I wanna add up that I did try with like 5-6 different themes,so my guess would be that I have another plug-in that doesn’t get along with this one, like Tweeter Notifier, or SEO plug in, or Hide Category plug-in, or any other related to posting!

So keep that in mind if you are experiencing my problems or similar

Reply
Taeke

December 20, 2009 at 6:39 pm

I think the best advice would be to make a backup of your database before(!) upgrading WordPress.. The backup plugin by il filosofo is a good start, you can even schedule backups

http://ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup/

good luck!

Reply
alaJoAnn

January 4, 2010 at 7:24 am

I have a strange problem. I lost access (including admin panel) to all my hosted WP sites – from my own computer. Other people can access them. My hosting company thought the problem was related to DNS issues with the ISP.

Access reappeared after 3 days. I installed a particular plugin, and again lost access to all my sites. Belatedly, I realized that was exactly what I had been doing when access was lost the first time.

Because a plugin seems to be involved with this problem, do you think it more likely a result of the recent WP upgrade and plugin incompatibility?

I ask because if access doesn’t return soon, I need to figure out who to contact for help. Thanks for any insight you can offer.

Reply
- Costa
  
  January 4, 2010 at 9:43 am
  
  Hi alaJoAnn,
  
  If the plugin is causing you the problem, then i guess the person to contact would be the developer of that plugin. Most decent plugin developers will have an update once any incompatibility is reported.
  
  If there are no upgrades then I am afraid you will have to stopp using that plugin. The WordPress team cannot and will not work on compatibility issues with third party plugins.
  
  Reply