WordPress, the software which runs this site, has now been updated to version 2.1. I have been battling the upgrade for a couple days, and this evening I finally gave up when “Fantastico” the automated installer/upgrader starting spitting new errors at me.
Those who know me will know that I can be incredibly stubborn when it comes to solving computer problems…refusing to take a secondary approach until I have exhausted all possible explanations for the primary approach to fail.
If I had wanted to, I could have gone for the manual upgrade, and that was my secondary approach, however I didn’t want to have any more downtime than absolutely necessary…and if an automated system is supposed to be able to upgrade WordPress with little-to-no downtime, why should I accept minutes of downtime, not to mention the fact that a manual upgrade would force me to use manual upgrades forever?
Before going for the manual upgrade, I decided to check with BlueHost [1] Support to see if there was any reason why it wouldn’t be working that they were aware of.
Kevin from BlueHost support was the person who helped me on the live chat, and after a bit of work at his end, WordPress was upgraded to 2.1
It would appear that disk space was the issue. BlueHost don’t automatically upgrade people’s webspace allowance when they change the package, mainly due to most people not even coming close to their allowance…however I had virtually hit the roof of the allowance prescribed by the previous version of my hosting package. Apparently getting it upgraded to the current 200GB webspace and 2TB/month bandwidth solved the problem.
So, thank you to kevin from Bluehost Support for his assistance.
Right now I’ve got a few minor formatting issues to fix which have come about as a result of the upgrade.
Samuel
Comments Disabled To "Thanks to Kevin"
#1 Comment By John B1_B5 On February 3, 2007 @ 8:51 pm
That’s marvellous, but there’s still no time on the original posting !
Feb.3rd, 2007 – when exactly, what time ?
#2 Comment By John B1_B5 On February 3, 2007 @ 9:26 pm
Ok, I see a time there now. You posted it at 8.41 pm .
Very good.
#3 Comment By Samuel On February 3, 2007 @ 10:43 pm
Making the time appear only required a tiny bit of editing. It provided a nice break from my task at the time of trying to make the site navigation at the top of each page appear properly.
It turns out that there has been a slight change in the way WordPress differentiates between pages and posts, and the Blix theme, being written for an older version of WordPress was blissfully unaware of the change. At first I thought it was an issue with the header template (the template responsible for the navigation bar and everything above it) as I had edited it under a previous version of WordPress to only show certain pages. I messed around with it for a while, I even tried manually writing the links, but the “highlighting depending on the page you are looking at” function wasn’t easy to implement.
Then I went and fixed the time issue, uploaded a fresh copy of the header template, put the taglines in, and decided to investigate the underlying function which gets a list of pages so that they can be displayed up there as links.
From a code perspective, I could see no faults, until I noticed that it was finding pages by their post status (eg. draft, published, static)…pages are apparently static, or at least were. I had a look in the database and discovered a “post type” category for differentiating between posts and pages.
One I fixed up that bit of the function, there was a list of pages up the top of every pages…but instead of being one row, it was three, simply because there are five pages (six links including “home”)…so back to the header template, and a simple matter of adding a couple lines of “do nothing for this page” type code.
All I have to do now is unblock access to the [2] (why the people at WordPress insist on blocking access to listing the contents of that folder by dumping an empty index file in there by default is beyond me), make the “Site Admin” say “Your Profile”, and then I think I’ll be just about done.
#4 Comment By Bearded Clam On February 5, 2007 @ 6:37 pm
Kevs a good guy. He once helped me fix my guttering AND passed on a recipe for sweet and sour chicken on the same day.
#5 Comment By Samuel On February 5, 2007 @ 6:49 pm
Are we talking about the same Kevin, Bearded Clam?
#6 Comment By Bearded Clam On February 5, 2007 @ 7:19 pm
I think so. About six foot tall, brown hair. He’s pretty distinctive.
#7 Comment By Samuel On February 5, 2007 @ 7:40 pm
I don’t know what the Kevin I was speaking with looks like, all I know is that he wors for Bluehost in Utah.
#8 Comment By John B1_B5 On February 5, 2007 @ 9:11 pm
You mean he ‘works’ for Bluehost do you Samuel ?
#9 Comment By Samuel On February 5, 2007 @ 9:58 pm
Yes, indeed I do John. I would imagine that “worring” would involve making a lot of noise, and wouldn’t be something Bluehost would encourage.
#10 Comment By John B1_B5 On February 5, 2007 @ 10:02 pm
OR – it could be interpreted as something along the lines of Jey’s “Whorrin’ it” .
#11 Comment By Samuel On February 5, 2007 @ 10:05 pm
True…I’m glad that’s not what I was thinking of though!