Technology & MSG

Blog Upgraded to Wordpress 2.5.1

May 11th, 2008 by Alex

I upgraded WordPress to 2.5.1 this morning without too many issues. It took longer to download and install all of the plugins than it did to convert the database over. I would have upgraded before, but I was running an antiquated version of MySQL until the server upgrade this past week. The upgrade itself took a few seconds, including the conversion from the old database.

I don’t care for the default theme, so I had some customization to do after the upgrade. I download the new version of the Mistylook theme. I knew that I’d need to edit the templates later, but the plugins alter the output and I didn’t want to clobber anything.

I downloaded and reinstalled Bad Behavior, Optimal Title, ShareThis (which has now changed to a JavaScript-based remote service model, which I’m not sure if I like too much), Similar Posts (which didn’t show up immediately, then I remembered that you have to edit the template before they’ll appear), and Ubernyms. I also installed Feed Locations to point my RSS feeds to FeedBurner, instead of hacking up the template like I did before.

After all of the plugins were installed I had to do the AdSense inserts and make some aesthetic changes. I also assigned proper weight to the page text for Google AdSense parsing. These are just HTML comments that tell the AdSense spider which sections to look at and which to ignore. Namely I don’t want to be generating ads based on comments or navigational elements, just the content itself.

The changes included:

Edited header.php to display of Google AdSense banners for non-commenters
Edited footer.php to include Google Analytics code and to change some minor aesthetic things
Edited page.php to fix Google AdSense content weighting.
Edited sidebar.php to add subscribe via email link, though I don’t think that module is being display anyways.
Edited single.php to fix Google AdSense content weighting and to add SimilarPosts output.

That isn’t too many hacks to make the pages look like they did before.

I couldn’t remember where I inserted Similar Posts into my RSS feed before. There used to be a separate plugin for that, but the author states that Similar Posts provides all of the functionality now; turns out there’s a largely expanded administrative panel for the plugin and the option it include in RSS feeds is there.

The Links still aren’t behaving properly. I can’t locate the option that used to be in the management pages to limit the number of links that are displayed at one time.

I like that there are tags now. Previously I was using Categories as tags. I might have to re-think how I categorize and sort my entries in the future. I see that there are Widgets, but I’m not too sure what they are or how they’re used. I’m sure it’s covered in the WordPress documentation, but I’m not there yet.

All told it took about an hour and a half.