WordPress Upgrade

WordPress version 2.6 just came out. I installed it from scratch on a new blog. The installation went beautifully, and I liked the new Admin interface.

I decided I should upgrade Tropical Blogging to the new version. Of course, I made sure I had backups of all the files, and a backup of the MySQL database, before doing anything.

I downloaded a fresh copy of WordPress, de-activated all my plugins per the instructions, followed the instructions to upload the files, and then followed the instructions to update the database. (Which basically consisted of clicking an “Update” button.)

All my posts were still there. But all the categories were missing! No, actually, they weren’t missing — they had numbers but no category names, and none of the posts were assigned to any categories.

I found a couple of posts on the WordPress support forum about this, but they weren’t any real help. The database structure had changed — there was no longer a “categories” table in the database. There’s a “category-to-tag” converter and a “tag-to-category” converter in the admin area, and I tried both, but neither one did anything.

I ended up manually re-creating each category, then manually assigning each post to appropriate categories. I almost just went back to my old WordPress installation, but I have this weird obsessions where once I start down a road I really hate to give up and go back.

I also discovered that my theme doesn’t work with this new version. It appears to work, initially — the home page of the blog loads just fine. But clicking any of the posts to “read more” results in an error. So I have to use a different theme, or get into troubleshooting that theme. Bah!

I’d like to update my clients’ WordPress-based blogs, but I sure don’t have time to muck around doing crap like that. For now I’ll take a pass. I hope WordPress addresses this issue, or those blogs will just forever have to be stuck on whatever version they’re currently runninng.