I’ve just successfully completed my WordPress 2.3 update. As far as WordPress updates go, this was a pretty big one. So big, in fact, that I actually followed the instructions and disabled (most) of my plugins to be sure the site worked after the update. I knew however, that disabling my plugins would just leave my site riddled with little “function x does not exist!” crumbs. So I employed a new plugin to aid me in reclaiming a clean site – Maintenance Mode. Very helpful. It’s something that exists in a lot of CMS software, but was left out in WordPress until recently. This little piece of code allowed me to demonstrate a splash page (which a few of you might have noticed earlier today) whilst I wreaked havoc on things behind the scenes.
The update went through with no problems, though I had some issues with incompatible plugins that weren’t actually generating errors. To make a long, technical story more easily digestible, I can summarize by saying you need about 16MB of memory allocated to PHP’s script execution in PHP 5.2 and WordPress 2.2.2 (including WordPress 2.3). You’ll also want to update plugins that hit deprecated tables in WordPress such as the Google Sitemap Generator and the WordPress Database Backup. Both of these have current versions that address this problem. I also migrated over from the Ultimate Tag Warrior to WP 2.3’s integrated tag management features. It’s not quite as slick as what UTW had put together, but it’s working and I have great expectations for its extensibility with additional plugins. At any rate, it probably goes without saying that you should not keep UTW enabled with the new version of WordPress – I had heard some people didn’t have any problems with it, but I don’t see how as it makes calls to non-existent (deprecated) tables (e.g. post2cat).