WordPress 2.9 is out. Should you upgrade now? NO!
Don’t be a beta-tester on your live site. Wait for some reviews to be written. Wait for people to test it with plugins and themes to see what, if anything breaks.
WishList products has already advised people using the wonderful WishList member to wait until they test the new version. Heed their words of advice.
Let others (and there will be plenty of them) do the testing and then do the upgrade. When you are ready, remember to deactivate all your plugins and do a database AND theme files backup.
Watch this blog and I will let you know when it seems safe to do this upgrade!
Cathy Perkins – The WordPress Wizard
Wish I had seen this before I upgraded, but it’s too late now. I wasn’t aware this was a beta release, it doesn’t indicate this anywhere in the documentation unless I missed it, which is entirely possible given how fast I read! At any rate, before I upgraded I was suddenly seeing my admin area displayed all screwy, and I have no idea what happened, but after I upgraded it was back to normal, thank goodness! I have seen no conflicts with the 30+ plug-ins I use, so hopefully it will stay that way. Merry Christmas!
Glad all went well for you. I did not say it was a beta release. I said don’t be a beta tester! To wait until others review and release their findings. I will probably wait a few weeks before I upgrade so I can read what everyone else (including you) have to say.
Well, I spoke too soon. I went in to add a plug-in yesterday and ALL of my plug-ins were gone and I got an error message that they all had a bad header. I looked at all the PHP files and they had been hacked with the “eval base64 decode” hack at the beginning of every file. I fixed them all (over 300 of them, I think!) and they came back, but now I can’t reactivate a couple of them and I get another screwy error message about the pluggable.php file. It doesn’t affect how the blog looks, but I have no clue how to fix it. The 2.9.1 upgrade of WP should be out soon, hopefully that fixes the problem, but you can be sure I’ll be deactivating all those plug-ins before I upgrade!
I think with anything its always just smart to wait a couple of weeks to see what the feedback is. You can avoid a lot of frustration that way. Every time I’ve tested something that was beta I ran into issues.
Again – I want to make it clear that I did not say WordPress 2.9 is in beta. I said don’t be a beta-tester. Wait for others to upgrade and watch what is being said. You are smart to wait a few weeks because with any new release it’s LIKE it’s beta until a lot of people actually use it. I don’t want to be one of those people using it my live site!!
Oooh – hate that for you! And a good practice before applying any upgrade is to deactivate all plugins, back everything up, apply the upgrade and then reactivate the plugins.
Thanks Cathy. Just curious, will the next upgrade fix that pluggable.php problem or will I have to trash everything and do a WP reinstall? Or can I restore the DB to an earlier state to fix it?
I don’t know what all the 2.9.1 version will take care of. All WordPress is is saying is that fourteen tickets have been fixed in 2.9.1 Beta 1.
And this – Unfortunately, the recent 2.9 release triggered a bug in certain versions of PHP’s curl extension. With these versions of curl, scheduled posts and pingbacks are not processed correctly.
But since 14 tickets have been fixed, I don’t think they all apply to curl extensions. Again – when the beta version is released, I would not install it on an active site. You said your blog is now displaying properly? If so, I’d wait for that one too.
Cathy
Thanks again, Cathy! I managed to fix the problem on my own by overwriting the affected files with clean ones from my last install. The error messages seem to be gone, but I’ll certainly take your advice when the next upgrade rolls around.