smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

It appears WP has gone release candidate. This is a very cool thing.. but, things are not quite ready for release IMHO.

If you use wordpress as standard, the upgrade should, more or less work. If you use cat2tag, ultimate tag warrior or deviate away even just a smidgen from the standard install (and lets face it, an increasingly large base of the wordpress community does) - then expect things to break.. badly.

In my case the upgrade took a horrible toll on the database - the new wp db version is not backwards compatible - if you take the “upgrade” path, perform a backup first or the results will be, well, unpleasant.

Here’s some highlights:

• two critical tables required by 2.0 were not created¹ - this broke categories and post count(s)
• inability to post any new entries, or edit existing posts².
• post content deleted when previewing post, again no data written to the db
• various mySQL errors³.
• incompatible wp db version - once you upgrade, that’s it - recovery time.

This is just scratching the surface. I suspect there are going to be horror stories post upgrade - which is inevitable given just how much ground has been covered to reach 2.0. It’s a massive change with a lot of very new code.

Now, before people go all Russell-Crowe-with-a-mobile-phone on me, I’m not knocking the new version. Far far from it, indeed WP 2.0 is going to kick some serious ass. However, I would not recommend an upgrade. Better to reset as many config options to the ‘default’ vanilla settings first as humanly possible (especially anything that involves “tags”), perform a backup of the core tables that are to be migrated (then back the whole damn thing up, files and all) - start with a 100% clean and empty db.. then import the data carefully, limiting data restore to as few tables as possible (perhaps categories, comments and posts only).

I will be creating a “clone” of this site and importing minimal data into a fresh new install when I feel WP 2.0 is bedded down properly. That, I suspect, is going to be the best method - upgrading anything other than a stock standard install, is not going to work in a large number of cases.. it’s a shame, as that was WP’s strength - one could upgrade virtually anything to Wordpress. With the complexity of code now in-trenched in 2.0, upgrading may no longer be such a strong feature.. time will tell.

1. Which required manual table creation in order to gain some form of functionality back (↩)
2. Changes did not appear to work - nor were they written to the wp database. (↩)
3. WP 2.0 appears to require a very modern mySQL implementation to achieve some tasks- this is going to cause grief for many many people. (↩)