I'm Just Sharing

If you remember, about a month ago I griped about WordPress 2.8 and all the things it seemingly messed up on my Top Finance Blog. I said that until they made some fixes to it that I wasn’t touching my other blogs.

Well, along comes 2.8.1, and I decided it was time to give it a shot. I first upgraded TFB, and saw that it immediately fixed some stuff that wouldn’t work before. Boosted by that, I decided to upgrade my business blog first, even though I have more posts there, and it’s older, but it gets less traffic than this blog. It went very well, and almost everything works perfectly. I did the same for this blog just a couple of minutes ago, and once again, almost everything works perfectly.

What isn’t working perfectly? You know how, on the dashboard, if you’re paying attention, there’s incoming messages on WordPress development and recent links to your site? Well, on TFB it’s working, but not on these other two blogs. It says it’s loading, but nothing’s coming up. However, since that’s something I rarely look at, it’s a minor inconvenience.

Of course, I will add this. I upgraded the lazy way today, which I blame on our friend Sire. I decided to do what he does and just upload things without taking the time to delete a ton of files and then do the upgrade. The reason? My FTP doesn’t allow you to delete a folder unless you delete everything that’s in the folder, and some of those folders have multiple folders with other folders and, a couple of times, other folders. It’s a long, involved process to keep deleting all that stuff. So, instead, I just uploaded the new wp-admin and wp-includes folders and let them overwrite what was already there. I did know better, and I hope you do also, than to upload the wp-content folder; do NOT do that unless you’re totally new to WordPress and haven’t created your blog yet.

However, there is one thing you should do in wp-content if you didn’t upgrade to WordPress 2.8 before. They have changed the look of both the classic and default WordPress themes, and not that you’d ever want to go back to those if you had a choice, but you never know if you need to do some theme maintenance and need to pop back to the “original” for a quick minute. So, go into wp-content, then themes, and upload the new Classic and Default folders.

One final thing. Before you do copy files over, or any other upgrade, always deactivate your plugins. Then, when you finally come back, if things aren’t working immediately, check your plugins to see if one of them might be messing things up. In the case of this blog, I had to deactivate my Subscribe To Comments plugin, which isn’t needed with 2.8.1 anymore.

Now I’m updated, protected, and relatively happy; I’m glad they got things right.

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