Fairly Painless WordPress 2.8 upgrades

June 17th, 2009 | WordPress Leave a Comment

I had the “privilege” of updating 47 websites today to the new WordPress 2.8 version. All of these sites were updated from version 2.7 or 2.71 so as you can imagine, there were no major issues. While taking care of these updates, I also took a look at all of the plugin upgrades and discovered only three plugins that were slightly problematic.

Following the upgrade and applying the latest patch CForms failed to work properly and the following error popped up:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class cf_mail in .../public_html/wp-content/plugins/cforms/lib_email.php on line 3


I did a quick search on Google, deleted and re-installed the plugin, but because I was in a hurry and didn’t want to leave the site without a working form, I simply decided to ditch the plugin and opted for Contact Form 7 instead. CForms has worked very well for me in the past, but I’m a bit uneasy and confused with the fact that they are no longer in the WordPress.org plugin repository, so I think that I’ll just stick to Contact Form 7 from now on.

When upgrading other websites that use CForm, I opted not to go through the plugin upgrade and will deal with those some other time.

Both My Category Order and NextGEN Gallery required an additional step once the update was applied. Following the My Category Order upgrade, I noticed that the categories were gone from the sidebar. I simply went to the Posts > My Category Order tab in the admin and clicked the button to re-order the categories and bingo, that did the trick.

Similarly, with the NextGEN Gallery, following the upgrade, I noticed that my slideshows no longer worked. Navigating to the Gallery section in the admin revealed a final step. Once the upgrade complete, the slideshows reappeared.

When building websites I try to minimize my use of plugins and always delete unactivated ones, but once live who knows what plugins will be installed by the client. Having said that, when looking at the list of plugins used on 47 sites, I’ve been impressed with their compatibility so far. All of the following plugins work perfectly:

  • Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button
  • Akismet
  • All in One SEO Pack
  • Audio player
  • Blubrry PowerPress
  • Custom Query String
  • Digg This
  • Email Immunizer
  • FeedBurner FeedSmith
  • Fuzzy Recent Posts
  • GD Star Rating
  • Get Recent Comments
  • Google XML Sitemaps
  • is_child
  • Kimili Flash Embed
  • My Page Order
  • Ozh’ Better Feed
  • pb-embedFlash
  • Post Content Filter
  • Quotes Collection
  • Redirection
  • Revision Control
  • Robots Meta
  • Secure WordPress
  • SlideShare
  • SEO Slugs
  • SEO Title Tag
  • ShareThis
  • TinyMCE Advanced
  • Transpose Email
  • What Would Seth Godin Do
  • WordPress Database Backup
  • WP Audio Player
  • wp-cache
  • wp supercache
  • WP-FLV
  • WP-PostViews
  • WP-SpamFree
  • Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
  • ZenphotoPress

All in all this was a good day.

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