Some Frustration with WordPress 2.1.2 Upgrade

This post illustrates, from my own very current experience, the challenge I see for non-technical people, like me, in using one of the main blogging platforms, WordPress from WordPress.org. And that probably applies also to any open source blogging platform which does not have paid hosting and support.

Over the past week I’ve spent more time than I care to think about, fiddling with blogs which have been upgraded to WordPress 2.1.2, by me or by others with more technical skills and knowledge than I am ever likely to have. This post echoes, in effect, the comment that I am pretty sure I have seen somewhere on the web, to the effect that if you are not really confident about your ability to handle any challenges with the upgrade you might be best not to attempt it. Make do with your un-upgraded version until you can be sure the bug coast is completely clear.

Fact is, with this on top of a few other complications during the week, I got so far behind with my other work commitments it wasn’t funny. But once I had launched on my upgrade path it seemed to be like being in a car on one of those narrow mountain roads where it’s more difficult and risky to go back than to keep inching forward.

Which in retrospect seems to have been an unnecessary, self-inflicted setback for my work program. Because in fact I only really wanted one feature, the ability to have a static front page, like this, which only became available with the 2.1 upgrade.

Some odd things happened. For example, I lost access completely to one blog – could not log in – and after a lot of trial and error, including many visits to the WordPress help forum and repeated iterations of applying the advice I found there, I gave up, downloaded the content in plain text form via the database and set up the site again from scratch. Fortunately it was not a highly trafficked or massively linked site. At some stage I will go through the old posts and see if any are worth re-constituting on the new site.

Then I discovered the problem of not being able to type into the editing pane for writing posts and pages. Basically, I found I could not type into the editing pane for writing posts or pages, although I could type into the subject bar:

In a WordPress help forum I found someone else had had the same problem and had found a solution, which I proceeded to apply. The problem was apparently that under Users I was listed as Administrator, which evidently – and surprisingly – was not providing other functions such as writing or editing. I created another user (me with a new user name) as an “Editor”, logged out and then logged in again as the new user. I was then able to write and edit to my heart’s content. Curiously, when I later deleted the new username, I was given the option to attribute the post by my “alter ego” to my original username. After that I was able to write and edit with the original username.

Having just now tested for this problem on another WordPress site I upgraded over the weekend, it appears the problem might be with Internet Explorer 7: the problem arose there but not with Mozilla Firefox.

WordPress is a great product, no question. And the fact that it’s free has meant that over the past few days I could delete and re-create sites at will, until I got it right, without sending a hosting service or my credit card transactions into a tailspin. I still feel that non-technical business people need to be aware that it may not work for them as smoothly as they might expect. And they should approach upgrades with care.

(Update – April 6. My experience since posting the above has been that the problem arises erratically and I really can’t sort out a pattern. Yesterday, on my Business Blogging Show site, I had the problem of seeing the draft when I typed it in, then having it disappear from the editing box, sometimes still appearing in the preview pane below, sometimes not, and whether I used IE7 or Firefox the problem was the same: with that blog the solution was to change themes – I installed K2, ver 0.95 which is explicitly stated as WordPress 2.1 compatible. So far, so good. On this Business and Blogging site the post writing/editing problem recurred using IE7 but I was/am able to write and edit using Mozilla Firefox – ver 2.0.0.3.)