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On Monday, Wordpress 2.3 was released, and it contains some major changes that are making people nervous about upgrading. After making the jump to WordPress 2.3 on my own site and upgrading my Better Blogroll Widget for WordPress, I thought I should share some of the information that helped me survive the upgrade with minimal damage.
Things You Need To Know Before Upgrading To WordPress 2.3
- The Basics
What’s New In WordPress 2.3
How to Install WordPress 2.3
How to Upgrade to WordPress 2.3
WordPress 2.3 Download - You Might Not Be Able To Log In
Some users are experiencing “ERROR: WordPress requires Cookies but your browser does not support them or they are blocked.” when trying to login after a WordPress 2.3 upgrade. It happened to me, and there’s nothing worse than feeling like you’re in the clear and then being locked out of your own site. Do yourself a favor and solve the issue before it happens by downloading an updated version of wp-login.php.
Update: This was written for upgrading to 2.3 and has been shown by some people to not be effective with a 2.3.1 upgrade. There may be more information available in this Wordpress support thread.
- Your Plugins Might Break
Check the Plugin Compatibility List for WordPress 2.3 before you upgrade so that you’re not caught off guard by one of your favorite plugins throwing up all over your pages. - Ultimate Tag Warrior is Dead
I know. I loved UTW, too. It made tagging so easy and WordPress took a big bite out of it and left the carcass behind. Not to worry though, WordPress 2.3 includes a tagging feature that will import your UTW tags, and Christine Davis (the UTW creator) has been working on some new plugins to replace some of the functionality you lose in the upgrade. - There Were Major Changes to Categories and Tags
If you developed a WordPress Plugin that uses categories or tags, you’re probably going to have to rewrite it. The upgrade broke my Better Blogroll Wordpress Widget, and I had to spend a few hours figuring out the schema changes and upgrading it to be fully compatible with WordPress 2.3. If you developed a WordPress plugin that uses tags or categories, this WordPress 2.3 database schema information from Infovore should help. - Wordpress Will Do Canonical Redirection
Subgum Mumbo who now? This just means that because Google sees yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com as two different entities, you traditionally had to set up a permanent redirect on your web server to point to one or the other to get Google to spider your site properly. WordPress now takes care of the redirection depending on whether you include “www” or not in the “Blog Address” field under Options / General on your dashboard. - You Still Need To Think About SEO
The canonical redirection issue might be solved, but there is still a lot that needs to be done to get you to claim your rightful spot at the top of Google’s ladder. 13 SEO Tips For WordPress from Chicken Camels should help you get on your way. - You Still Need To Protect It
You may be on the latest and most secure version of WordPress, but you may be offering up more information about your WordPress installation than you want to. First, go into your header.php and wipe out the line<meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo('version'); ?>" />to stop advertising your version of WordPress to the entire world. Next, either addOptions -Indexesinto your .htaccess file to stop directory browsing site-wide or, at a minimum, put a blank index.php in your wp-content/ plugins/ directory to stop advertising the plugins you’re using (If you want to verify whether you have this problem, navigate to yoursite.com/ wp-content/ plugins/ in your browser and see if you get a directory listing). Don’t let simple things like this give someone enough info to deface your site. For other ideas on hardening WordPress check out Protecting your WordPress Blog from Lorelle.
Have any more Wordpress 2.3 survival tips? Share them in the comments.
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September 27th, 2007 at 10:21 am
sooo…why should i upgrade? seems like a total headache for the non-techy.
September 27th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
Wait, you have a website? Interesting.
The benefits for the non-techie:
1. Bugs were fixed, holes were plugged.
2. Draft and post management is more organized.
3. The built-in Tagging and canonical redirection helps your search engine rankings
4. The advanced editor has more buttons, so you type less code.
WordPress upgrades can be a headache for the non-technical person, but as long as you follow the instructions exactly, it usually goes smoothly.
If you still don’t want to do it, then you call someone who has upgraded WordPress a million times and you ask him to help you out. If you happen to be related to that person or are a regular reader of that person’s website, I’m sure he would be willing to lend a hand.
October 1st, 2007 at 8:56 pm
While I don’t use wordpress for my site, I can still appreciate a good write up on how to successfully upgrade any piece of software with relative ease.
I cringe everytime I get an update announcement from ExpressionEngine. I put it off far longer than I should, but it always goes well in the end - but I’m always cautious and back up EVERYTHING and then read the instructions on upgrading first, then read them while actually upgrading.
October 2nd, 2007 at 3:45 pm
I like Wordpress a lot and highly recommend it. You can focus on writing if you want or get under the hood and get your hands dirty if you want. I’ve never really used expressionengine though, so I can’t say if it’s better or worse.
October 2nd, 2007 at 4:29 pm
I took a peek at wordpress at one point just to familiarize myself with it. One of my friends was asking me questions on how he should go about accomplishing certain things, and seeing as how he used wordpress, I did some research to try to help him out.
Straight out of the box, ExpressionEngine seems to be an easier piece of software to get started with - and basically anything regarding PHP and MySQL can be done with EE in templates and what-not. Most of the templates work around EE’s own tags - rather than just straight PHP tags, which is what wordpress uses if I’m not mistaken.
Wordpress (from what I could tell of the tiny bit that I looked at) really starts with the absolute basics - but there’s so much information out there that making it do what you want it to doesn’t seem that hard.
I used MovableType for a few years, and while it got the job done, it got to be very resource heavy - unlike PHP based software (MT used CGI, and may still use it).
I made the move from MT to EE and it went off without a hitch - that right there made me a believer.
If I had several years worth of information stored up in WP, and was comfortable with it, I wouldn’t switch to EE though.
October 7th, 2007 at 12:43 am
Thanks for the writeup-I never worry about security but perhaps I should…
Maybe you can help me: before I upgraded to 2.2.3 and then 2.3 within a week of each other, I noticed that my site was taking longer to load than before, and regularly enough to make me irritated I get the “This Internet Explorer page could not be displayed” (I think) message. Why oh why is the darn blog loading so slow?
(Of course you’ll go and check out my site and it’ll load just fine but it’s broken, I tell ya!)
October 8th, 2007 at 7:31 am
Hey, I checked out your site, Jummy, and it looks like it’s loading fine. I wonder if you have a plugin that might be slowing things down.
e-mail me if you still are having the issue.
October 23rd, 2007 at 8:26 am
I am one of the many who have been haunted by “ERROR: WordPress requires Cookies but your browser does not support them or they are blocked.”
I recently moved to WordPress from Movable Type. This ERROR almost sent me racing back to MT. Thanks for easily stating the bugs and resolutions in version 2.3.
November 12th, 2007 at 10:15 am
I installed 2.3.1 and used your updated wp-login.php but still no go. I get the dreaded cookies error.
November 17th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
updated login.php doesn’t work… *g*
December 28th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
help help, i upgraded to 2.3.1 and my blog posts don’t show up on the front page any more. I don’t know what to do. help help. spread good karma over the New Year.
Happy New Year.
Thanks.
April 17th, 2008 at 8:14 am
I installed 2.3.1 and used your updated wp-login.php but still no go. I get the dreaded cookies error. [B]ME TOO[/B]
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HELP!! ANY ADVICE???