Upgrading to WordPress 2.8 – a painful process

Upgrading to WordPress 2.8 – a painful process

Have just spent a frustrating few hours upgrading to the latest version of WordPress – 2.8 – which was released earlier today.
Having done the usual backups beforehand, I foolishly tried the auto-upgrade feature that’s built into WordPress – usually I upload manually by FTP.
The auto-upgrade didn’t seem to work fully – it put the site onto maintenance and then kept creating files in the web root called core.xxx with xxx being an ever increasing number – until the site reached it’s maximum data allowance. Upon deleting these files, it just kept creating more and I couldn’t work out how to stop this seemingly endless loop.
In the meantime I then had a 500 server error on all admin and frontend pages – thanks to a tip-off from Jack Pickard I went on the hunt for plugins that weren’t WP2.8 compatible.
Having renamed all the plugins via FTP to disable them (as I couldn’t get into the admin area to disable them properly), I started renaming them back to their original names one-by-one, testing the site each time to see if it reappeared.
Eventually I’ve traced the 500 server errors back to two plugins which don’t (at the time of posting) work with WordPress 2.8:
WP-PluginsUsed
WP-Options-Manager
Once these two were out the way, the 500 server errors stopped and all seemed almost normal.
The only remaining problem was with the /blog/ section of the site, where all my blog entries reside. For some reason it was showing an old entry from 2007, when it should show recent posts in reverse chronological order.
This is controlled by the filosofo-home-page-control plugin – which looking in the admin section appeared to still be set up correctly. However by re-entering the settings for the plugin and resaving them, it all now seems fixed.
Please let me know if you spot anything looking amiss, but hopefully all is now well. I think I’ll do all future upgrades manually again as I could have done without three hours of fiddling with the WordPress setup for what’s normally a simple and straightforward process.
ps just tried to upload an image with this post, but it seems the overlay image uploader in the admin area’s broken too, but it’s late and I can’t face troubleshooting that now!
Update 15 June 2009
Both the offending plug-ins above have now been updated and work fine with 2.8 – the lesson for me is to wait until plug-in releases catch up with WordPress core releases!

About SIMON

I work as a fractional Chief Operating Officer (COO), consultant and advisor. I created the B3 framework® for company building and I also write a newsletter called Build for leaders who care about creating resilient and sustainable businesses.