A Few Notes on Updating UMW Blogs to WordPress 3.5

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The upgrade process for WordPress has been so seamless the last three or four versions that I didn’t realize how spoiled I’ve been until I finally had an issue (and even that was quite simple to resolve).  Between automatic updates for plugins, themes, and core files, WordPress has nailed the convenience end of upgrades, and that’s no small thing—just ask anyone who has to upgrade a Mediawiki install 🙂

UMW Blogs did have one hangup going from 3.4.2 to 3.5 with the SharDB plugin. It was throing the following error:

Warning: array_search() expects parameter 2 to be array, null given in /home/umwblogs/public_html/wp-content/db.php on line 250

Luke Waltzer had the same issue on Blogs@Baruch, so I knew I was in good company 🙂 And, as is always the case, Ron Rennick (the original author of the plugin) was on it. (Ron and Andrea deserve every bit of kudos they get from the WordPress community and more.) He fixed the issue in the db.php file for the plugin and noted he would update the trunk at some point. But in the interim if you have an issue getting it to work leave a comment and I’ll post the code I’m using.

What’s nice about moving to 3.5 is that we can once again use dsader’s now out-of-print 3-in-1 widget to display recent posts on the front page of UMW Blogs, which is pulling off the http://tags.umwblogs.org blog. We’ve had performance issues with this one before, so we have to watch it pretty close for load spikes.

Another issue that was just brought to my attention is that WordPress 3.5 begins the phase out of the Links Manger. I hadn’t heard about this yet—I need to read up on new releases better 🙂 —so I installed and network activated Andrew Nacin’s Links Manager plugin in the interim until I figure out how this might effect folks on UWM Blogs. To be clear, if you were using Links Manger before the upgrade that functionality is still intact from what I understand, it is all new blogs that are created won’t have it as a visible option.

Other that that, UMW Blogs is once again running on the latest and greatest for the new semester. If anyone else knows of any issues we should be aware of I’d love to hear em.

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4 Responses to A Few Notes on Updating UMW Blogs to WordPress 3.5

  1. Alan Levine says:

    That’s great news. I did the entire upgrade on ds106 in less than 2 minutes, zero hitches.

    I was intrigued too when I saw the demise of Links but am glad you can get the functionality back via a plugin. I can guess they want to wean it out as a separate kind of data (it occupies its own table), and you can probably replicate the functionality as a custom post type (?) Or maybe blogrolls are just old news (i find the links really useful).

    There seem to be reports of quirks in the visual editor (jquery conflicts??). I am getting to like the drag and drop media updater, though I saw on my own blog it got a little bit quirky when I had upped a bunch of animated GIFs. What was curious there is that the square icons in the media gallery are animated as well, so under the hood there is a way to resize animated GIFs and preserve the animation. I am not sure how it applies to other sizes.

    WordPress #4life

  2. Ron says:

    I did update SharDB so anyone can get the code you have by downloading the developer version.

  3. Pingback: A Few Notes on Updating UMW Blogs to WordPress 3.5 | bavatuesdays | News of shopping

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