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God I hate WordPress so bad right now

Posted by Jacques Chester on Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Upgrading from 2.2.3 to the 2.3 release had two effects:

  1. The cat2email plugin, which we rely on to power Missing Link, breaks.
  2. The upgrade borked our categories. Every category is gone, every post is now uncategorised. Why? So WordPress developers can feel good at how cleverly they tied together tags and categories.

It doesn’t help that this time I was lazy and didn’t back up the database. Oh, there was the usual “you should back up your database, files and kittens” boilerplate in the release notes. But what I would have liked is “warning, will completely bork your carefully chosen categories system”.

I am so po’d I could choke. At myself. At the WordPress mob. At the amount of work this means for yours truly.

Update: They say the bad workman blames his tools. It’s simple: if I’d backed up the database like the last three times, this wouldn’t have happened. Now I guess I’ll need to fix the uncategorised posts manually.

Some good news though. A lot of posts and associations seem to have come through unscathed on unloading and reloading the database.

Update 2: About 300-400 posts had some categories missing. About 6 hours ago I decided it would be a doddle to recategorise them manually. The devil made sure to ensure that “Economics” was a category that went walk about, including as it does almost every post from the prodigious keyboard of Nicholas Gruen. Anyway, it’s done now, and it let me revisit a few gems from the archive. This really is a great site.

Update 3: Oh, and as those of you who subscribe to Missing Link via email discovered, the cat2email plugin works just fine. It just doesn’t seem to.



 This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 at 9:58 PM and filed under Site News. Follow comments here with the RSS 2.0 feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.

16 Responses to “God I hate WordPress so bad right now”

  1. Graham Bell said:

    Jacques Chester:
    Welcome back …. and so swiftly too.

    You said

    “They say the bad workman blames his tools”

    Sometimes that’s because the tools, and the training in the use of them, are faulty or inappropriate.

    Posted on 04-Oct-07 at 6:15 am | Permalink
  2. Amanda said:

    *hugz!*

    Posted on 04-Oct-07 at 7:10 am | Permalink
  3. Sans Blog said:

    It’s always to best to wait a few weeks after a WP release before upgrading and during that time keep a close eye on the WP support forums for reports of all the bugs, plugin incompatibility etc.

    Posted on 04-Oct-07 at 7:27 am | Permalink
  4. Jacques Chester said:

    That’s a fine theory for projects with more sophisticated release management, but WordPress always bundle a bunch of security fixes into their major point releases. Tracking the subversion repository is too much hassle, but to keep the place as secure as possible I follow the point releases pretty closely.

    This all ignores the fact that the single biggest danger to the integrity of our database was in fact the upgrade script from WordPress. Goody.

    Posted on 04-Oct-07 at 7:31 am | Permalink
  5. Jacques Chester said:

    Speaking of releases, the WordPress.org developer list is currently blazing with ideas about what to do in the next release. How about fixing bugs, fortheloveoftapdancingf*ck. Such as my pet peeve – that WordPress is not UTF8 from end to end, causing corrupted characters when databases are dumped and reloaded – it has been pushed back again.

    Posted on 04-Oct-07 at 7:35 am | Permalink
  6. Sinclair Davidson said:

    You’re good man, Jacques – well done.

    Posted on 04-Oct-07 at 7:47 am | Permalink
  7. Damien Eldridge said:

    What Sinclair said!!!

    Posted on 04-Oct-07 at 7:56 am | Permalink
  8. Damien Eldridge said:

    Well, at least, what Sinclair said in comment 6 on this thread!!! I don’t know where you find the time for all this Jacques!!!

    Posted on 04-Oct-07 at 7:58 am | Permalink
  9. D W Griffiths said:

    What Sinclair said too.

    Posted on 04-Oct-07 at 9:09 am | Permalink
  10. The Worst of Perth said:

    I think you’ll find the correct quote is “A poor workman pulls his tool.”

    Posted on 04-Oct-07 at 10:39 am | Permalink
  11. skepticlawyer said:

    Star effort, Jacques – very much appreciated.

    Posted on 04-Oct-07 at 1:59 pm | Permalink
  12. Tony T. said:

    Gimme back that $0.00 I gave you.

    Posted on 04-Oct-07 at 3:49 pm | Permalink
  13. Niall said:

    The upgrade borked our categories

    is ‘borked’ a word? If not, I’d be putting it up on Urban Dictionary, Jacques.

    Wup! Just checked and it is. “To have totally fucked something up. Usually by doing something stupid. Specifically used to describe technology that is broken.”

    Appropriate even.

    Posted on 04-Oct-07 at 4:40 pm | Permalink
  14. Sinclair Davidson said:

    oi, Damien. So little faith. Who told you how whatisname, Captain Jack, got back to the present in Torchwood? Ha. I’m wounded.

    Posted on 04-Oct-07 at 7:32 pm | Permalink
  15. wmmbb said:

    Jacques:

    “Contact Club Troppo” does not seem to be working. I get “Error 404″.

    Posted on 07-Oct-07 at 8:17 pm | Permalink
  16. The State of WordPress’s Upgrade Cycle :: WPLover said:

    [...] you have to upgrade when a new version comes out. And hope they didnt introduce bugs that, say, drop the categories on hundreds of stories when upgrading. Because they dont know if it will, because they dont write tests to prove the software is [...]

    Posted on 27-Jul-08 at 8:34 am | Permalink

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