All The Info upgrades to WordPress 2.7

I hate upgrades. I don’t care what it is, upgrading software sucks.

I’ve worked in the tech industry for a while, and the nemesis of every IT person in the world is the software upgrade.

Since I hate it so much, all my blogs have been running on a WordPress 2.2 version. If you use WordPress, you know that 2.5 was a major revision.

This morning I decided to do an upgrade. I installed 2.7 and immediately found some things that were broken.

Popularity Contest, the neato plugin that puts the popularity number at the bottom of each post, had a fatal error. Andrew Daum had a great post with a nice video that explained how to fix Popularity Contest

The Now Reading plugin that I use to list the books I’m reading also had some issues. Found an update in a post entitled Now Reading for WordPress 2.7

Also upgraded the nextgen gallery plugin that s my photo albums. This actually went smoothly and I was able to use the automatic update feature of WordPress.

After upgrading I found out that Ultimate Tag Warrior is no longer supported because tagging is built into WordPress now. That’s unfortunate because I had every post tagged and now those all went away. If there is a way to convert my old tags into the WordPress format, somebody please let me know.

Finally, and this was one of the big reasons I upgraded, I installed the Post Ideas plugin that helps managed ideas for new posts. So far I’m a little pleased, only thing I didn’t like is when I went to write this post it didn’t move my notes over anywhere like I expected it to. No problem, just a quirky thing.

So, WordPress is all up to date, only took a couple hours. Still have time left to take down some Christmas lights, get to the gym and be back in time to watch the Falcons crush the Cardinals.

Help me upgrade

So, I have a web host, Hostgator, that I run this site on. It’s got a great program named cpanel that manages installation of things like wordpress – which I’m using here.

I’m a couple minor revisions behind, and I’d like to keep up, but the fantastico installer tells me to

Upgrade only if
– no files, languages, themes have been modified
– you haven’t added mods to this installation of WordPress

What is this all about? I can’t automatically upgrade if I’ve created a theme or added a mod? Who runs a blog without a theme or a blog. How useless! Grrrr.