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!
3 Responses to “Upgrading WP”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
The new version is already up and should work fine on 1.5.1.1. 🙂
The best way to stop spam would be to spend some time in moderating the comments persoanlly rather than relying on any captchas. You can go to the other extreme of not allowing anyone to comment — but then the whole essence of sharing information is lost. At least Yahoo and MSN rewards the commentators with relevant backlinks, so that is a reward which many spammers like to go for.
I do check the comments that are posted to see if some spam slips through. I get so much spam that relying solely on moderation with no help from a spam filter isn’t practical, unfortunately. I’m guessing SpamKarma also occasionally eats a real comment that I don’t see in time to resurrect — in this case I hope people repost.