WordPress 2.0.3 Update—A Success?
June 3, 2006
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Technical Functions : Trackback,
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WordPress updated to 2.0.3 to fix a security leak. Thus came my first experiencing updating the beast. Outcome? Not too bad. Big time consumer, but no real problems in the aftermath. (Hint: WordPress recommends deactivating all plugins. Make certain you reactivate the "Sidebar Widget" plugin before you activate any other widget plugins! Makes total sense, but in my rush to get everything back online, I learned that lesson the hard way.)
Readers, if you see any craziness in the blog you didn't notice before, let me know. Seeing that I'm viewing this through a specific OS, browser, and as the admin, I may not be seeing what you see.
Thanks!
Tags: Technical, WordPress
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Looks good. I always forget to disable plugins and have to do it all over again. Why can’t I just read the instructions???
I had downloaded the entire 2.0.3 zip file and later discovered that this guy had a specially prepared zip that had the changed files only. I downloaded that one and replaced the files to then run the upgrade when I logged into the admin station.
However, you need to download and unzip the wordpress2.0.3 file because the Akismet (I love) and the wp-database-backup plugin files that are in the “wp-content/plugins” directory are new versions than was released in 2.0.2.
You do need to disable plugins before installing and you do need to read the documentation (still slightly flawed but a lot better from the beginning where you had to really know Linux/ Apache/ PHP/ and MySQL to install) before installing. In fact, the documentation on how to install/upgrade from the codex.wordpress.org site is much better than the documentation in the zip file and the wordpress.org/support page is good. Also there’s a chatroom at irc.freenode.net /join #wordpress with some people there to help.
oops.
I hit the add a comment button before I was finished. When I had upgraded from 1.0.5 to 2.0.2, I had to go back and re-review all the active plugins I had because some of them did not work in the new version. Ended up changing my captcha because of this and have not yet added the new e-mail post plugin because installation appears to be more tedious and time consuming.
Yeah, I downloaded that e-mail post plugin, too, and it’s way too complicated and asks you to modify so many things that it’s guaranteed to break should you upgrade WordPress. I didn’t bother.
I’m using Spam Karma in conjunction with Akismet and together they’ve blocked all but two trackback and comment spams. That’s pretty good. I’m not so sure about visual captchas. I know I mess them up all the time on other people’s blogs and it’s frustrating.
I got the WP-email plugin to work. It was a chore but it does work based on the test I ran.
I have had to use the captchas because I was getting comment spam in addition to trackback spam. I did not like Spam Karma because it overrides any manual moderation of a post before being posted and it allowed obscene posts to go through. Bad Behavior did much better in that realm of thought.
Something you may want to look at is “Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter Plugin” that places a copyright statement (fully editable and customizable) at the end of a RSS feed.
I did not turn off any plugins, but my upgrade to 2.0.3 went fine. But I’m not using widgets (yet). I don’t know if that has something to do with it.
2.0.3 is really a security patch fix update from 2.0.2. However, it is needed for security purposes. Nothing major is altered except some minor possible security bugs that could take place.
I normally use Firefox as my browser. However, you site does not view good in it, so I switched back to MSIE. It does not move easily down the page in Firefox. And, also, the white background is transparent, whereas it isn’t in MSIE. Yours is not the first site with WordPress I’ve had a problem with like this.
Barb,
A couple things:
I use Firefox all the time and don’t see any problems with the site save for some jerkiness in displaying individual posts with comments. The plugin I use to nest comments really taxes the video card of some systems over a transparent foreground. I’ve got a bottom-of-the-barrel video card in my PC and things are jerky because the card can’t keep up with the screen redraws forced by the plugin over the top of the transparency.
There’s an extension you can get for Firefox called Smoothwheel that helps some.
The issue with the transparent background is one of those silly Microsoft non-standard-CSS issues in that the call for transparency in IE is so bizarre and twisted that I was never able to get it right and gave up. Ironically, the transparency call in Firefox is also non-compliant, but it’s far easier to call. I left that in. That’s why you see it in Firefox and not IE.
If I ditched the transparency, a few things would get better, but I like it so it’s going to stay.
Barb:
This depends on both the template/themes design preferences as to whether the template/theme should be optimized for IE or Firefox. Also, the way the two browsers are different, they do not read cascading style sheets (.css files) the exact same.
Also which version of Firefox you have will make a difference, If you do not have it, download Firefox 1.5, install, and then re-view the page again. Firefox did make changes in how it handled and displayed items inside of a css filein earlier revisions.
In fact, there is a debate right now in web coding standards about the css2 protocol and the new css3 protocol because Microsoft is refusing to support css3 because they were not asked to be involved in the making of the standard.
I know of one template that actually has two style sheets, one for Firefox and one for IE because of the way the two browsers do not read style sheets the same.
I am using firefox and so far, everything appears fine to me
I’m using Firefox 1.5.0.4. I can see the site fine. It’s just that there is this problem with the inability for it to scroll properly. I downloaded the plugin, but it doesn’t seem to help any.
Totem,
Do you know a way to center the delicious, furl, cocommment and other icons at the bottom of the screen. They’re called from a stylesheet called “sociable.css” (part of the Sociable plugin) and I’ve messed with that CSS a million ways and can’t get the block to center.
Any ideas? It looks bad uncentered.
Dan – can you ’splain all those littl icons or point me to something that does? I vaguely understand delicious & digg, but most of the others I’ve not heard of.
BTW – looks good from here. On an unrelated note (this hapened before they upgrade), the side bar seems to load a bit slow and seems to ‘adjust’ itself as it does. I’ve clicked the rwong link to get to a ‘recent post’ before as a result. Why is that?
Dan:
I had never heard of the plugin until you mentioned it. Therefore, I went to the site, downloaded, zipped, uploaded, and activated it.
On my template, what I did to center (and some of this was per the Sociable webpage at http://push.cx/sociable and followed his advice of
(1): use the admin panel (options -> Sociable) to turn off the display on all pages (which was the default setting). To make it look even neater, I eliminated the text above the symbols.
(2): I then went to my “comments.php” page within the folder of my activated theme and added the following code near the bottom of the page
Saved and uploaded.
Try this to see if that works.
hey dan –
the page looks great. as a fellow firefox user on a pretty nice system
, it would be nice if you disabled the transparency option. it really is a noticeable degradation in speed when i surf on ceruleansanctum compared to other sites. just my .2!