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When upgrading your blogging software doesn’t quite go to plan…

If you’ve been wondering the reason for the slight drop in the number of posts this month, then allow me to explain.   In addition to our server move (thankfully that all went well), I was finding that spam comments were getting through Akismet (the spam blocker) and so decided to upgrade that plug-in.   I soon found that I couldn’t and that I first needed to upgrade my version of Wordpress.   I did that, updated Akismet and solved the spam issue, but the new version of Wordpress (2.5.1) left a lot to be desired.   It broke various aspects of the theme, meaning I had to update the theme to one that is more compliant with 2.5.x (thanks, Perun!) and then re-apply all my changes to that theme (which are quite extensive). But, what’s worse is the ugly admin interface that comes with the latest version of Wordpress.   I’m sure there are many other Wordpress bloggers that are not happy with it (in fact, I’ve read many of disgruntled comments already) but don’t despair… there is a solution.   Thank goodness for Judy Brenner who has devised a hack that enables categories to be displayed to the right of the post area (where they should be!) rather than beneath. This might not sound like a big issue but when you have as many categories as this blog has, and you’re doing regular posts each with multiple categories assigned, it makes a world of difference. Another bugbear with the new version for me has been what Wordpress have done with ‘scheduled posts’.   As you may or may not realise, bloggers have the ability to write an entry for their blogs and can specify a date in the future when they would like it to go ‘live’. This is useful for a travel blog such as this one as, since when I’m on my travels, I try to ensure that there is still new material appearing on the blog on a daily basis.   Scheduled posts allow me to achieve this.   At any one time, I could see what posts were about to appear and when… until the recent ‘upgrade’, that is.   Scheduled posts were removed from the main dashboard and buried elsewhere in the admin interface.   And, just to really put the boot in, they decided to change the order of the posts, so that the post that was next to appear was displayed last and not first as before.   Thank goodness for Viper007Bond’s scheduled posts plugin which has remedied that problem. Anyway, enough of me going on… hopefully the links here will be useful to other Wordpress bloggers experiencing similar problems, and at least now I can get back to blogging!

Paul Johnson

Paul Johnson is Editor of A Luxury Travel Blog and has worked in the travel industry for more than 30 years. He is Winner of the Innovations in Travel ‘Best Travel Influencer’ Award from WIRED magazine. In addition to other awards, the blog has also been voted “one of the world’s best travel blogs” and “best for luxury” by The Daily Telegraph.

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2 Comments

  1. Thanks for the insight into WP 2.5.1, although it’s too bad you ran into so many problems. It is interesting that even though WP 2.5 took a long time to be released, it’s still buggy. It makes me think that I will wait for awhile before moving away from WP 2.5.

    Mark

  2. Maybe that’s we are not using the new version of Wordpress. I’m sorry to hear that it’s not what you expected. Maybe the next version would be better. I hate dealing with buggy programs, that’s for sure.

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