Upgrading To Wordpress 2.5

I’ll be upgrading kenmc.com to Wordpress 2.5 starting within the next half hour or so. If you’re visiting the site between 1:30pm and 2:30pm and spot any abnormalities then I’ll apologise in advance and ensure you that normal service will resume shortly.

After spending a lot of time last night testing out a local install with some of my preferred plugins, I’m not expecting any real damage to occur and foresee a relatively smooth transition.

Of course, stranger things have happened….

If you’re updating to Wordpress 2.5, don’t forget to disable any and all plugins before you begin uploading and activiting. Once you’ve completed the necessary upgrade steps (normally be executing yourdomain.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php), switch them back on one at a time and see if you spy any difficulties. Hopefully I won’t see anything too radical.

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Wordpress 2.5 Is Live And Wild (Plus Popularity Contest Notes)

Update April 5th: Download patched version of plugin here.. Note you’ll still need to make the database changes if you don’t have the tables already in place.

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The long awaited Wordpress 2.5 has been released. In fairness, some of the advances in WP2.5 are as great that it could well have been labelled Wordpress 3.0 but who’s to argue with version numbers.

Before rolling out upgrades across a number of my own blogs and blogs I manage for others, I’ve been doing the precautionary thing of testing WP2.5 locally with a variety of homemade themes and some of my regular plugins.

Plugin Issues

So far I’ve only found an issue with with Alex King’s Popularity Contest plugin - if you try to activate the plugin under WP2.5, for the moment, you’ll see it triggers a fatal error. This can be fixed as outlined here

Open popularity-contest.php and scroll down to line 59. Replace require(’../../wp-blog-header.php’); with require(’../wp-blog-header.php’);

However, in running the plugin locally I found that after making the changes in order to get the plugin to activate, it wouldn’t create the two tables needed in order to run, so these had to be entered manually (via phpMyAdmin). To create the tables, you’ll need to run the following SQL queries.

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `PREFIX_ak_popularity` (
`post_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
`total` int(11) NOT NULL,
`feed_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`home_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`archive_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`category_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`single_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`comments` int(11) NOT NULL,
`pingbacks` int(11) NOT NULL,
`trackbacks` int(11) NOT NULL,
`last_modified` datetime,
KEY `post_id` (`post_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM;

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `PREFIX_ak_popularity_options` (
`option_name` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
`option_value` varchar(50) NOT NULL
) ENGINE=MyISAM;

Note that PREFIX refers to your Wordpress table prefix, in most common cases it is simply wp_ unless you’ve got multiple copies of Wordpress running in the same database.

Initial Impression

Love it. I downloaded the latest SVN version only yesterday in the office though never got around to playing with it (of course not knowing the full release would hit today). The admin interface is much smoother, I’m liking the customisable dashboard (I used to edit the admin index and strip out everything bar the ‘write a post’ link and stats) and the overall colour scheme is much more appealing. I was never a visual editor user before (and won’t change in a hurry), but I do like the changes they’ve made, including the full screen option for those intensive blogging moments.

I’ll have a full play around with the gallery / media functions yet as well as making sure my other preferred plugins (sitemaps, podpress etc.) are all up to working order before doing a widescale upgrade.

You can download the latest version of Wordpress 2.5 right here. You can also see a full list of new features right here.

Blogging For (Creative) Beginners

I’ll be giving a half day beginner blogging course in Kilkenny in May under the ArtLinks banner. With details being finalised just before the weekend and rolling out with the new ArtLinks business courses being promoted for the summer, I’ll have to say I’m looking forward to giving the course and working with more creative types in Kilkenny.

That said, the course will be promoted to creative practitioners working within Kilkenny, Carlow, Waterford, Wexford and Wicklow and should attract a good blend of visual artists, musicians, writers and the likes. This will be the second course I’ve been involved in putting together for ArtLinks, having facilitated a “Getting Ahead In The Music Industry” day (my 90 minute talk focusing on effective use of the web for musicians) in Wicklow last November.

For musicians who are new to blogging and don’t want to wait until May for a chat, have a gander of Kyra Reed’s recent blog post for TuneCore on Why Every Artist Needs A Blog.

It is also nice to see that the Kilkenny Arts Office have also started the ball blogging about their Artist In Residence programme at the gallery at 72 John Street.