Tom Raftery’s Social Media

WordPress launched it’s long anticipated WordPress app for the iPhone and iPod Touch this morning. See http://iPhone.wordpress.org for more.

I downloaded to my iPod and am writing this post using it.

The write screen seems quite bare. I don’t yet see how to add links, emphasis or photos to posts. I am sure the functionality is there I just need to look around more.

Ok there was some kind of bug when I was using this first and the bottom Menu bar was missing. I hit the Home button quitting out of the app and opened it again. This notified me that it had recovered a post (good, I thought I would lose it when I quit).

Opening the post now displays the bottom menu so I don’t know what caused the bug or if it will recur.

I still don’t see an easy way to create links in blog posts.

Adding multiple blogs is easy. The hardest part (for me) was being able to remember the passwords!

It is a free download. And they say it will be open source. Not sure where to download the code from yet. Will update this post as soon as I find out.

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Beware if you update to WordPress 2.5 and are using the very popular K2 theme.

If you are using K2 and you do update to 2.5, you will receive the following error on trying to browse to your WordPress dashboard:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_register_sidebar_widget() in /path-to-blog/wp-admin/includes/dashboard.php on line 31

A bit of research told me that this is because K2 turns off WordPress widgets in favour of its own widget manager and as 2.5 has started to widgetize the Dashboard, you get this error.

To fix the error:
navigate to your K2 folder -> app -> includes
edit the file widgets-removal.php as below

Change the contents of the file from:

< ?php
if (get_option('k2sidebarmanager') == '1') {
	remove_action('plugins_loaded', 'wp_maybe_load_widgets', 0);
}
?>

to

< ?php
if (get_option('k2sidebarmanager') == '1') {
	remove_action('plugins_loaded', 'wp_maybe_load_widgets', 0);
  if( is_admin() )
	{global $pagenow; if( $pagenow == 'index.php' ) wp_maybe_load_widgets();
}
}
?>

Your dashboard should now be browsable once more!

I knew I should have held off on updating longer. I blame Donncha!

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I read Matt’s post about the release of a beta version of WordPress 2.5 this morning with great excitement (sad aren’t I?) and immediately downloaded it.

The screenshots Matt put up look great and I can’t wait to try it out.

However, then I had a rare moment of clarity. Waaaait a sec Tom. Let’s not go breaking the site just yet.

Often blog software updates break plugins and occasionally themes. I certainly had difficulties with this site the last time I upgraded.

Let’s not repeat that again in a hurry.

SO if anyone has tried out WordPress 2.5, how is it looking, what are the gotchas and how soon will a painless upgrade be viable?

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Since I updated this blog to WordPress 2.3 and K2 RC2, I have been having reports that the blog crashes Safari (but only Safari 2, not Safari 3).

Today I think I sorted the problem.

I switched the blog from using the native Wordpress’ Widgets to manage the sidebar to using K2’s Sidebar Manager and now the crashing seems to have stopped.

I’m not sure why the WordPress Widgets was causing the blog to crash Safari 2 but if you are having this problem, try switching to using the K2 Sidebar Manager.

It worked for me.

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Sean McNamara alerted me via the comments on this blog that my RSS feed was broken (thanks a million Sean). I sorted that out this morning so it should be good again and Google Reader is certainly having no problem seeing my posts now.

So what happened? To be honest, I’m not entirely sure (!) but I think it had more to do with my FeedBurner account than WordPress, per se.

The sequence of events was along the lines of

• I checked the WordPRess 2.3 plugin compatibility page and realised my old, fully functioning FeedBurner plugin needed to be updated
• I uploaded the new plugin and activated it (having deleted the old one)
• I did the rest of the upgrade and fixed issues as they arose

Then I saw Sean’s comment. Uh oh! I went over to Google Reader and sure enough no posts for the last couple of days were present, d’oh!

I checked back my FeedBurner Plugin config and while all seemed ok, when I checked the “create a FeedBurner feed for …” link, it looks like that the updated plugin created a new feed for the blog.

This meant I had to head over to the FeedBurner site and set up the new feed from scratch – a considerable annoyance. All my stats on my old feed are no longer associated with the new one.

Strictly, this wasn’t a WordPress issue, more of a left-field issue associated with upgrading the FeedBurner plugin. However, the lack of support by WordPress for older plugins is the only reason I upgraded – triggering the loss of my RSS feed.

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Phew!

Finally done with that install – ouch! I wouldn’t want to go through that again in a hurry.

I hit several speed bumps in my upgrading of this blog from WordPress 2.2 to 2.3 – many of those could have been avoided if I had followed the instructions on the Extended Upgrade page instead of the Upgrade page!

Specifically, if you are upgrading, not only should you also upgrade all plugins before starting the blog update, but you should then disable all plugins before uploading WordPress 2.3.

I use the K2 theme on this site, so I checked it out, and sure enough there is a new version of K2 (K2 RC1) available for WordPress 2.3 as well. If you plan on upgrading to RC1, be aware that Michael Heilemann says in the release notes:

Because so many things have been upgraded since v0.9.6, a lot of the code hasn’t actually seen as much usage as the v0.9.6 code, and thus you should hold off until RC2 with upgrading if you like your stability over your ‘bling’

I decided to try out the widget functionality which comes with K2 RC1 but I came a cropper on a bug in the code and so reverted to using the less functional, but fully operational WordPress Widgets.

One of the biggest advances in WordPress 2.3 is the inclusion of Tags. This is fantastic news for anyone who hasn’t used tags up to now as it provides a simple way for them to begin. However, I was using a plugin (Ultimate Tag Warrior) for my tagging and this no longer works with WordPress 2.3.

WordPress 2.3 has the ability to Import existing Tags though (Manage -> Import -> Ultimate Tag Warrior) meaning all my tagging up to now hasn’t been in vain!

Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) had two great features:

1. UTW presented you with a drop-down of all your previous tags when writing a post so you could easily chose one you had previously. This is missing from 2.3
2. UTW had a Suggest option whereby it would scan the text of your post and suggest appropriate tags

Christine Davis, the author of UTW has already released plugins to fill in this missing functionality!

Other features added in this release of WordPress are highlighted here.

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