Archive for the ‘technology’ Category

Welcome to WordPress 3

Monday, June 21st, 2010

My version of wordpress was quite antiquated. So old in fact, that there was no “automatic” upgrade path. So I snagged the latest wordpress zip available, and began applying the manual update. Sadly I discovered that the instance of MySql running on my hosted server was very, very old. I admit I haven’t done any maintenance since I added my custom banner several years ago. My first task was to upgrade to a newer version of MySql.

Hold on to your shorts – I was running MySql 4.0.30 – wow! So, I grabbed a box of MySql 5.x off the shelf, then attended to migrating my old wordpress database schema. This was fast and easy. I imported the schema, then applied the wordpress database updates. But there was one hitch… Smart quotes, smart apostrophes, em-dashes, and other special characters did not surface in my posts correctly. So, I re-imported the schema several times, trying different character set encoding directives (such as utf8 and cp-1250). I finally settled on Latin1 encoding, and my posts look “nice”. I probably should have converted the schema to utf8, but I’ll schedule that task for later.

Good bye wp2.1, hello wp3! Kudos to the wordpress developers! I am impressed so far.

Now maybe I will post more often since the interface to wp3 is much slicker than before. I also plan on finally looking into plugins for managing comments better.