Daily Archives: Monday, 28th April 2008
One More Thing…
OK, the upgrade does seem to have worked without any obvious ill-effects. I had to do a bit of tweaking to make WPG2 use the right page for its output. It likes to use a page called, logically enough, WPG2, with a link of /wpg2. But if the plugin is deactivated then upgraded and reactivated, it sees there’s already a page called that, so it creates one with the link /wpg2-2, which would be fine except my header menu is pointing at /wpg2. All I had to do was delete the old WPG2 page and edit the Permalink for the new one to point at /wpg2. The plugin picked up this change and everything reverted to normal.
Well, almost normal. While everything seems to work, the layout of the albums in the gallery pages isn’t quite as it was. All the text is rather larger, which suggests that some of the CSS it needs has changed in the new WPG2. It doesn’t actually look bad, so I’m inclined to leave it for now – certainly until I’m sure WPG2 is at a stable version.
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Yahoops!
Earlier this evening, I logged onto Yahoogroups for the first time in ages. I don’t often use the web interface there, but I needed to upload some pictures for a group, so I just had to do it. Once I’d logged in, I was faced with this slightly confusing message. Apparently they want to make things much better and spiffier by copy my profile somewhere, but it seems that the location in question is secret.
Now I’m not all that concerned about where Yahoo wants to store the data it has about me, but if they’re offering me a choice, I’d like to have some clue where they’re proposing to put it. I declined their kind offer…
Weight Report – 28 April 2008
Oh dearie me. Up again today, by quite a lot. Ummmm, random wossnames caused by the weekend, or something.
Yet again, there was a distinct lack of walking and while I didn’t have any sausage rolls, that’s because they’d sold out, and I had a sausage and baked bean melt instead.
That seems to have worked…
Well, that didn’t hurt much. Here’s what I did to upgrade Losing it[1] to WordPress 2.5.1:
I replaced the plugin that puts in the random quotes at the top of the page with a slightly spiffier one that:
- Makes it easier to add, remove and edit quotes
- Doesn’t put its Edit page in the wp-admin folder
The new one is Ozh Random Words. The other one automagically wrapped the quote in <div> tags with suitable class names, so I just replicated that code and put the call to the new function inside them.
I removed one or two plugins that either won’t work with 2.5.x, or are not necessary now.
I switched to the default theme to keep things simple.
I deactivated all plugins. This has generally been a best practice recommendation that I don’t always follow, but for major version upgrades, I think it’s a very good idea.
I zipped the current losingit folder on the server as an additional backup.
I then ran the lovely EasyWPUpdate script supplied by Brian Layman
That got the site updated to the latest version – 2.5.1.
I then started reactivating plugins, and gave the new auto-update feature a test. It works. Nuff said. Basically, if a plugin is hosted at the official library thingy, it should be able to update automatically – you just click the link, the new version is downloaded, the old one zapped and the new one installed. This worked fine for me with a small selection of plugins, and I’d describe it as a significant benefit to all manner of users. Geeks like me are fine downloading, unzipping, deleting and uploading[1], but for normal people this will be much easier. This takes the update notification feature that’s been around for a while from being “moderately handy” to “really rather spiffy”.
Then I grabbed the snapshot zip file of the nearly released WPG2, zipped and deleted the old version, unzipped the new one and activated it. I had to make a small configuration change before it would validate, but that was quite straightforward.
I checked that the site seemed to be working, and switched back to my own custom theme which you’re looking at now[2].
Finally, I added another plugin – Admin Drop-Down Menu by the same guy as the quotes plugin I mentioned earlier[3]. This rearranges the menus in the admin interface into a form that I find more useful.
Still to do:
- Implement the built-in Gravatar support in place of the plugin I’ve been using.
- Find that plugin that lets me have a wider box to type into
- Look for other stuff to tweak the admin interface a bit more
- Post lots more stuff!
[1] OK, I wget from the command line and unzip from there, but the idea is the same
[2] Unless you’re doing the sensible thing and reading this in your RSS aggregator, that is
[3] Nice plugins, Ozh! 
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Excuse me while I change…
I mentioned yesterday that there was just one thing holding me back from upgrading to WordPress 2.5.x, namely the new version of WPG2. Well, WPG2 is finished, and while not quite actually released yet, appears to be ready.
So, I’ll be doing that upgrade this evening. It may take a little while, and if you visit while things are being fiddled with, you might see some oddness[1]. Or you might see nothing at all if it breaks. 
[1] Other than the normal kind, that is
