WordPress 2.1 Gotchas

I figured I’d follow up my 10 Things You Should Know About WordPress 2.1 with another useful post. The reality is that there were bound to be discoveries by the masses after the launch and over the past few days, this assumption has been borne out. The really tech savvy among us and those who participate (or at least religiously observe) in WordPress development, particularly via the email lists, have a tendency to “forget” what it’s like to not know the ins and outs of WordPress.

So having watched the uptake of WP 2.1 the past few days and learned a thing or two that I did not know along the way, I thought it would be useful to post some of the things that have cropped up in the mass migrations from WordPress 2.0.x to WordPress 2.1.

After my upgrade, my blogroll is all screwy.

I mentioned in my 10 Things article that there were semantic reasons for the combination (at least on the back end) of categories and what was formerly knows as “Links”. You’ll notice that Links is now called Bookmarks and is actually a category to itself among the Category listing.

I still don’t want to get into the semantics of why this was done the way it was done, but in the process of reconstructing this portion of WordPress, it seems that some people are experiencing issues when displaying their blogroll. Though the particulars on these blogs are varied, I should point out that there are two functions - an old one and a new one - and it seems that some people are having problems with the old one working as expected. The old function is get_links_list() which has been deprecated, but not removed, from WordPress 2.1. It is advised that theme authors use wp_list_bookmarks() instead. If you dig into the code, or refer to the Codex page, you’ll find that this function is far more powerful anyway.

Since my upgrade, it seems blogroll items appear in multiple categories.

There is a bug in 2.1 that is not serious in terms of security but can do strange things with blogroll links. Namely, upgrading from a 2.0.x blog can result in some blogroll items being added to other categories. This can be manually fixed and no data is lost, but it is an annoyance. [Trac 3418]

I’m experiencing some difficulties with popular plugins not working.

In my own experiences, there are several plugins which claim to work with 2.1 that do not. The biggest one, for me, is podPress. podPress 7.0 was billed as working in 2.1 but in fact it does not. The developer has assisted me in a small way but the plugin is still broke. That said, Audio Player from Martin Laine does, and has almost the same features as podPress. The Fuzzy Recently Commented widget from Semiologic also seems to not be handling storing of settings either.

Why can’t WordPress support Atom 1.0 as a standard feed format?

Folks waiting for WP 2.1 to get full Atom 1.0 support will have to wait for WordPress 2.2. It was added to trunk in revision 4805, so we should see it in WordPress 2.2. If you’re really daring, and I’m not suggesting that you should be, you could do what I do and run trunk (I’m actually a couple days behind). There is also a plugin that I cannot vouch for but looks interesting that provides Atom 1.0 support to WordPress.

There are no posts displayed after WordPress 2.1 upgrade

Pretty standard answer here. You have to actually run the upgrade script because of the way posts/pages, etc are handled in 2.1. There is a database schema change and the only way the database can be altered to work with 2.1 is with the upgrade script. If you simply upload the files and load your blog, you will see the No posts found message. The upgrade script can be found in wp-admin/upgrade.php and it should be run from your browser.

I don’t see the tabbed editor.

The “Use visual text editor when writing” checkbox needs to be checked under Users > Your Profile.

These are not all the questions coming out, and you may have your own to add. But they are some of the things I’m hearing a lot of. As a bonus, this WordPress theme is the shizzle.

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About the Author: Aaron Brazell is the lead editor of Technosailor.com and a social media expert. His passion is to see companies and individuals use the internet and web technologies wisely and effectively to promote their brands and companies. He served as Director of Technology at b5media from 2005-2008 and is currently an independent consultant.