I'm Just Sharing

Hey, wasn’t it only a couple of weeks ago that we had to upgrade to WordPress 2.8.6? No matter; now it’s time for WordPress 2.9, and I’ll first say I wasn’t necessarily happy about doing it, but I knew I’d have to test it eventually. So, I upgraded my finance blog; here’s where I am with it.

As you know, automatic upgrades don’t work with me, and WP is saying it’s my hosts fault. So be it; I have a FTP, so I went that route with it. The update itself went pretty well. Of course, before you do any update you always deactivate all plugins.

Then I came back and it said I had to upgrade the database, but that took less than 5 seconds after clicking the button. I went into the dashboard to look around, and all looked pretty good.

Now it was time to activate my plugins. And, as it figures, there were problems. The first problem right off the bat is that WordPress 2.9 is supposed to show you more information regarding your plugins and whether they’re compatible or not. I don’t have that, and I can’t find where I’m supposed to activate it, if that’s what you’re supposed to do. I’m already not a happy camper.

I first activated all that I’d had activated beforehand. Many of the items on the dashboard wouldn’t work anymore. I deactivated them all then started doing them one by one. If one worked, I left it alone and went to the next one. When I was finished testing in that fashion, I now have 4 plugins that won’t work with that site that worked before. Well, let me qualify that. Three of them will work, but mess up the admin. The fourth isn’t working, and it’s giving me an error message. That’s irksome, to say the least.

But y’all know I like to be a bit more thorough than that when I can be. So, I deactivated all my plugins except Askimet and CommentLuv; I knew those two were always absolutely safe. Then it was time to test the plugins that supposedly wouldn’t work at all.

The first one I tested is a plugin called WP-Cumulus. If you look at the bottom right of this blog you see that circling tag cloud. I can’t remember who told me about that, but I like it instead of that long list of tags. It was the program where it was giving me all these error messages. On its own, it’s working on that blog, but it took out the information I was getting in the “Other WordPress News” area.

The second one I tested was Twitter Tools, where I only use one of the 4 options you are given. Running it on its own, it does the same as WP-Cumulus.

The third one I tested was Whydowork Adsense, which I had said I removed from all my blogs, but I hadn’t removed it from that one. Once again, on its own, it works just like the two above.

The last one is Limit Login Attempts, which I’ve talked about recently. It did the same thing as the other three; freaky, right?

As a quick test, I decided to try one more thing. I wanted to see how these things worked if I removed CommentLuv. Limit Login Attempts, Whydowork Adsense and WP-Cumulus all work perfectly; Twitter Tools still shuts down Other WordPress News.

What this points out is that it’s not necessarily one plugin that’s messing everything up, but the compatibility between certain plugins that messes stuff up; heck! That means I now have to figure out which plugins I really want, and what stuff I don’t necessarily care about in the dashboard. I have to admit that I’d never seen Other WordPress News on any of my blogs, and now that I see it there’s a lot of good stuff I’d love to be seeing all the time. But that would be the one I’d have to sacrifice to use most of my other plugins, which I am going to use because they help my blog work better. Decisions, decisions.

I decided to leave WP-Cumulus for the time being and add other plugins one by one to see what might still work well. The first one I added back was Feedburner Smith, which of course runs the Feedburner RSS subscription service; works well together.

Then I added the DoFollow plugin, a must if you want to be able to make your blog, well, a dofollow blog, which helps to encourage comment participation. Everything is still perfect.

Next was to add the Webreader plugin, which is also known as Read Speaker. Now is where there’s the compatibility issue; it was good while it lasted. However, for the moment, I remove this plugin to see if the next one will mess with me also.

The one I add back is All In One SEO, and it definitely won’t work with that one. Now I know that it’s not going to play well with the big boys, but I really want AIO SEO. So I remove WP-Cumulus, only to discover that I still don’t have Other WordPress News. So, that one’s about to be the odd man out, because I need to get many of my plugins back onto that blog.

Back goes CommentLuv. Back goes Google XML Sitesmap. Back goes Limit Login Attempts. Back goes NoSelf Pings, which I’ve never written about, but it works great if you do a lot of internal linking, which I do, and keeps you from pinging yourself all the time.

I add Subscribe To Comments back, and now I have an issue. It takes out the Plugins category in the Dashboard. I want that, so I remove it for the time being and push forward.

I add back Webreader. I add back Twitter Tools; heck, that took out both Plugins and WordPress Development Blog. Nope, I want those, so I remove it for the moment.

On a fluke I decide to see what happens if I load Broken Link Checker. It takes out everything, but finds two broken links. I’ll come back to the links later, but this one easily gets removed again.

I add back WP-Cumulus. I add back Whydowork Adsense. All is pretty okay.

This leaves me with two plugins I want that don’t play well with others; Subscribe To Comments and Twitter Tools. And I’m stuck. People have to be able to subscribe to comments, otherwise why would they leave a comment? That’s the problem with having an older theme, no matter how cool it is. So, for now, it’s there, and I lose those Dashboard things. And since I’ve lost those, Twitter Tools is also back, as I also feel I need that one.

The message here is that it just might be the theme that’s messing you up as much as the plugin; what a drag. Still, I hope all this testing I’ve done helps you out with your blog.

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