We recently upgraded our blog to WordPress 3.1, which WordPress’ Matt Mullenweg described as “lots of fun.” It turns out that “fun” is a matter of perspective and I personally did not think that this release was especially funny. A friend of mine, Keith Line, who runs Natural Food List, ran into some issues as well – and since we discuss WordPress matters quite a bit, virtually every day, we felt it was a good idea to compare our upgrade experiences within a few paragraphs. Two perspectives, two experiences. Enjoy!
Keith’s Perspective on WordPress 3.1
I recently upgraded our website to a new hosting environment. I moved the site from a shared server to a Rackspace Cloud Site and decided that it would be a great time to also update WordPress to it’s newest incremental version – 3.1. How bad could it be? I figured that it would take ten minutes and then I would move onto more pressing matters. Boy, was I ever wrong.
The good news is that I upgraded the site on the new server while the live site was still being served from the old host. The bad news is that it took three days to get the site transferred over and working properly.
In the previous version of WordPress, there was a certain amount of grace that the site exhibited when a naughty plugin presented itself. It turned it off and said that there was a problem. It made sense – easy to understand, easy to fix. However, when I would install an offending plugin on WordPress 3.1, the administration area would turn into a blank screen. In some cases, the entire site would stop working. What to do?
I had to manually remove all of the plug-ins via FTP. I thought that would do the trick, yet when I reinstalled a plug-in that was known to be good, it would still present a white screen of nothingness. So, I did some Googling and determined that I needed to find the appropriate database table row dedicated and strip out some code. Seriously? Who is going to do this? I’ve been a computer geek for years and I found this process to be intolerable.
Admittedly, I feel sort of bad complaining since WordPress is essentially free. Yet because of this, WordPress is used by millions of people worldwide, many for mission critical business websites, blogs and newspapers.
When it breaks, it hurts. I pour my heart and soul into my website. I got lucky this time, because I was working on a staging server, but what if I wasn’t? Even though it is stable now and our site is up in the clouds, many of the necessary plug-ins had to be removed. Some functionality is now missing and new options have to be investigated. This is a major fallout from an incremental change. On the upside, I did learn one thing – I plan on donating some money to WordPress soon. This way, I can feel much less guilty about being so darn angry when it fails to work in the future.
Keith Line is the editor of The Natural Food List, an organic food news website that reports on consumer issues, technology advancements, safety concerns and political agendas that surround organic agriculture. The Natural Food List can be found at http://www.naturalfoodlist.com and is on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/naturalfoodlist
Wolfgang’s Perspective on WordPress 3.1
WordPress is a fantastic tool for bloggers. A few years ago, you paid thousands of dollars for a reasonable content management system and you had to have a very experienced admin to go along with it (gee, I don’t really miss those days). Now you can apply yourself today to WordPress and come up with a nicely customized blog with very little expense. In fact, ConceivablyTech was originally planned to be just an experimental blog to add my two cents to tech journalism, and has just recently evolved into something much more.
WordPress updates are substantial updates that either fix security holes or update the functionality of the site. In both cases, I tend to take those updates for granted and automatically update without thinking too much about it. The recent 3.1 update changed my thoughts about that and taught me that even a hobby WordPress blog isn’t entirely automated and it is a good idea to know how it works, if you care about it. If you are passionate about your blog, there is even more reason to anticipate disasters and know how to react to them accordingly.
WordPress 3.1 was, as far as I can remember, one of the best feature updates, but one of the worst backend updates that should have never been released in the way it was.
A simple click rendered ConceivablyTech last week completely useless. The front page was still up, but every content page presented a not so pleasing 404 error. Thankfully, the databases (which I learned to update diligently) were still intact. Part of the WordPress experience is its community, from where the average blogger draws most of her/his experience. Eventually, we learned that ConceivablyTech was not the only site affected by the update and there were a bunch of bloggers complaining about 404 errors and wiped admin passwords. We also learned that the same problem existed with the release candidate of 3.1 and the developers decided not to address this issue.
Unfortunately, there was no quick fix and the idea of reverting 3.1 to 3.0 is only a good idea if you are the adventurous kind of a webmaster. Reverting WordPress to a previous version is, generally, a bad idea and involves quite a bit of work (hint to the WordPress guys: What about a downgrade feature in a future WordPress version?). Eventually, and with the help of the WordPress community, we were able to isolate the problem to two causes: A permalink and plug-in incompatibility. We could turn off our fancy permalinks in the URL bar and get our content to show up, but we lost more than 250,000 working links to our site in return. If you have ever built a website with the goal of increasing your reach, you know how painful this is if your livelihood depends on it and dropping those links wasn’t really option.
WordPress support itself struck out, which was rather upsetting since they had been aware of the problem for some time. But hey, you get what you pay for, so I am the last one complaining about the CMS. The truth of the matter is that you don’t get WordPress for free, it is the support in the backend that will increase in its cost the more important a blog is – whether that is on your own time or if you hire a service provider. We adapted a hybrid solution, which worked well in the 3.1 upgrade scenario. If you are blogging, you should know the tech basics of your platform, you should be engaged in the community and you need the safety net of a service provider – which is a good idea because of WordPress hack attacks that are, unfortunately, a reality you have to live with.
As for the 3.1 upgrade, our tech service provider (not the hosting service, since we also learned that a host is likely more problem than help these days) fixed the issue within half an hour. Lesson learned: We don’t take WordPress upgrades for granted anymore and will use a different update strategy with an additional safety net.
Wolfgang Gruener is an analyst and technology consultant as well as managing editor of ConceivablyTech. As a hopeless idealist who believes that technology will work, one day, in the same way as it is advertised, he enjoys reviewing and writing about technology that has the potential to change our life. He focuses on consumer cloud computing and web browsers, smartphones, tablets and game consoles. Visit ConceivablyTech at http://www.conceivablytech.com/.
This article is cross-posted on the Conceivably Tech and Natural Food List websites.
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