I like the latest and greatest. I’m all about shiny and new.
But the latests version of WordPress is just out of reach for me right now without some theme surgery.
I tried to update my personal blog to WordPress 2.2 a little while back and ran into a problem. Everything looked OK on the front side of the blog, but when I tried to to my control panel I got a white screen with a Fatal Error message.
Now like Forest Gump, Ah ahm noht a smahrt mahan, but I do know “Fatal Error” is computer-speak for “Very Bad”. It is akin to the infamous Windows Blue Screen of Death. Not good.
My first thought was that I had an incompatible plugin running. I’ve had that problem before. But I went in and deleted them off my server one by one. None of them seemed to be causing the problem.
Hmmm… Maybe it was a bad install. Perhaps one of the files got corrupted during the process. “Corrupted”. That’s another computer-speak word for “something went wrong but we’re not sure what or why. Let’s just try-it again and see if it starts working on its own.”
So I reverted back to the previous version. Funny how upgrading is a “one-click” process but downgrading is, shall we say, a bit more involved.
Anyway, before I could get back to my own blog and try it again, I had to set up a new site for a client. Clean install with no baggage. Everything worked fine.
Wouldn’t you know the theme the client wanted caused it to crash right away.
Several others I found also caused problems with WordPress 2.2.
The short of it is, there are a whole bunch of themes out there which need some significant upgrading for them to be compatible with WordPress 2.2. That includes the themes I’m using both here at SuccessCREEations and over on my personal blog.
So where do you go to find themes that will work when you upgrade? Well the Codex, of course. Here is the currently list of known WordPress 2.2 compatible themes.
Hopefully that will save you some heartache when you finally get around to upgrading. 
And I’ve been meaning to update my themes anyway. So don’t be surprised if things change a little ’round here in the near future.
Enjoy!
Nothing like breaking something to push you to a new look – been there, done that. But change can be good – I look forward to seeing the new and improved version. Will it have a Klondike bar for the RSS icon?
There’s a thought! Toss the lighthouse for a Klondike bar.
Oh, but I suppose there might be some trademark issues…
I think I’ve found the new theme I want to use as a baseline. Now it is on to the task of some serious tweaking!
I feel your pain, Chris. My transition to 2.2 has been less than graceful. Of course, I’ve broken more templates than I remember. But that is all behind me now.
I was thinking about you, Troy, with your theme of the week, or so it sometimes seems. I bet you’ve found several that have been a challenge.
The bleeding edge has left me with blood electronic blood on my hands more times than I want to remember.
I thing you may want to try is a local install of something like xammp or xammplite to work some of the bugs out before you go live.
I’ve thought about the local install thing before, Rick and that’s a very good idea. That way I could test with my actual MySQL data before I went live.
What I’m doing is testing and tweeking on another domain I own (that is after my last little ordeal, anyway). I can muck about and break things to my heart’s content there and not worry about causing problems.
I keep other domains on hand specifically for that purpose. Good luck and let me know if you need some one to test it out before it goes live.
I never thought about keeping extra domains just to play with. It’s one of those doh moments for me.
Rick – when you think about it, it really doesn’t cost that much to do. I have a reseller account anyhow so my extra domains don’t cost me anything to host – just the $8.95 a year to own them.
Hi Char,
I can do the same thing with my account. All three of my sites are hosted on it. I can also set up subdomains so I wouldn’t even have to buy a new domain. I just never thought about it. One question I have though. Once you get something working on your test domain, how much work is it to transfer it to an active domain. Doing things locally, I just ftp everything once. Is it easier or harder transferring things from another domain?
I only use the test domains to tryout the theme and tweak all the css and features. Once I have it the way I want it, I just copy the files locally to the right directory and FTP them to the live site.
So, no, not really very hard.
Yeah. What Char said!
I’m just messing with the theme and the layout. Then it is as easy as uploading the new theme and activating it in the control panel.
Of course I don’t have all the same plugins, etc on my test site at the moment, although there’s no reason why I couldn’t.
All in all it make the whole thing fairly easy.
A word of advise. Just chuck the WP and go New Blogger
Hi Chris. Just to let you know I’m back and miss your inciteful observations.
Cheers!
…BB
Heya Bloke! Glad to have you back.
Gotta disagree with you on the Blogger thing, new or otherwise. Having messed with both old and new Bloggers, There is soooo much more I can do with WordPress.
It would take a huge improvement on their end to entice me to turn back.
Granted, WP has a plethora of plugins available, but I haven’t yet found anything that I cannot do the same thing with NB and a little hacking skills.
Anyhow, I was just stirring up the pot a little for fun. You know me.
Both are wonderful platforms with their own strengths and weaknesses and in the hands of the right coder.
No doubt Blogger has sure come a long way.
I just find that WordPress is not only a powerful blogging platform, but it can also power more conventional web sites for my clients who insist on them.
And you are a pot-stirrer extrordinare!