Anyway

Last week I upgraded the blog soft­ware to Word­Press 1.5.1 from 1.5. Here­with a few notes for oth­ers plan­ning to do this.

The upgrade was mostly unevent­ful, with only two prob­lems of any note, under­scor­ing that you really should deac­tiv­ate any plu­gins you have before start­ing the upgrade process:

• BAStats does­n’t work, as it appears some of the func­tions it calls have been rearranged into dif­fer­ent files. The author seems to be think­ing of releas­ing a new ver­sion at some stage, so for the time being I’ve just turned it off. 
• The feeds were empty, but search­ing on the WP sup­port for­um came up with a patch (update: no longer avail­able, or needed) which fixed the problem.

Of course, now the Word­Press team have released 1.5.1.1, which includes that bug-fix, so I just spent the last 10 minutes (lit­er­ally) installing that. The 10 minutes includes back­ing up the com­plete data­base, deac­tiv­at­ing all the plu­gins, installing, react­iv­at­ing the plu­gins, and check­ing the results.

All in all a rel­at­ively pain­less upgrade. I gath­er there are a lot of secur­ity fixes, which alone make the upgrade worth­while, and it also meant I could install Spam Karma 2, which is a big improve­ment over the pre­vi­ous ver­sion, both in being able to get rid of old com­ment spam and not have it clut­ter­ing up your data­base, and in its fil­ter­ing abil­it­ies. Both of these factors made upgrad­ing worth­while. Now I just have to find the time to write more!