I upgraded to WordPress 2.1

Posted on: February 2, 2007

Looks like things are working smoothly on my blog again; pardon if you saw scary messages like this earlier:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: register_sidebar_widget() in /home/.kirkland/torley/torley.com/wp-content/plugins/
cat_widget.php on line 105

I should've abided by my general principle of doing things right by doing them backwards; the Upgrading Wordpress page states you should deactivate plugins before installing. For whatever reason, this caused a chain of troubles: I had to comment out lines, and even then it didn't work. So I rolled back to the older version, kept all plugins ON this time, and upgraded again.

Result? It works. Wonderfully strange.

Anyway, there's no drastic differences you'll be seeing, nor I — some of the added features are for the internal editor, but I just about always use Windows Live Writer. A lot of the improvements are behind-the-scenes ("cleaner code"), which psychologically feels good.

Right now, I've got some tidying up to do: removal of unused plugins and looking for upgrades to current ones.

4 Responses to “I upgraded to WordPress 2.1”

  1. Gwyneth Llewelyn Says:
    February 3rd, 2007 at 8:55 AM PST

    Wow, congratulations :) I have been (as always) reluctant to do another huge upgrade myself (again!), but it seems that I have to do it soon — I've been hit with huge amounts of spam lately, and apparently Wordpress 2.1 is able to reduce that more effectively. Also, I'm eager to see if the TinyMCE editor has solved the memory issues it has with Firefox 2.0+ (Firefox 1.5+ seems to work fine).

    Nice work, Torley!

  2. Torley Says:
    February 3rd, 2007 at 10:53 AM PST

    Thanx Gwyn! Usually, I'm not an early adopter, but I figured I already missed 2.1 by almost a couple weeks since it's been out… soooo I made the leap.

    Yeah, apparently WP 2.1 has an upgraded Akismet filter. I haven't noticed a difference thus far, since anecdotally, I already had 3 pieces of spam that made it through.

    Now, seeing your avatar here makes me hope that Gravatar 2.0 will come out soon… early February, they say!

  3. Gwyneth Llewelyn Says:
    February 4th, 2007 at 10:52 AM PST

    Taking the plunge and doing the upgrade myself right now… if I only understood why my site is soooooo slow…

  4. Torley Says:
    February 5th, 2007 at 8:33 PM PST

    I wonder why too, Gwyn. I couldn't get to your site just 10 min. ago, and waited for it to load. :\

    I should note a problem I found today is that WordPress 2.1 treats Pages differently than Posts — the two I had:

      * my About page
      * another for Search Results

    suddenly disappeared! Thankfully, they were found amongst the Post archives — well, at least the About one was. I copied-and-pasted it into a proper Page, found my Google CSE code for the SR Page (perhaps the fact it's enclosed in HTML comments led to it being blanked out during the transition), and deleted the faux Posts.

    Also see "How Pages are different in WP 2.1".

    This wasn't a nice surprise, and I really wish it had converted them automatically. So heads-up! :o)

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