WordPress love or hate?
My blog1 has been powered by WordPress since 2005 which makes this the 5th year I have been using WordPress. As WordPress evolved into a larger and more complex blogging platform with 1001 features2 and plugins, the number of problems it’s been giving me has also increased.
I’m not known to be an adventurous person hence I stick to WordPress for fear that any changes might screw up the entire blog. Tweeps following me3 would have known that I am rather famous for screwing up my blog this year4. During the course of my unfortunate experiences, I had written some notes to remind myself what to do/not to do on WordPress. This will help serve as a constant reminder to myself and hopefully minimise any form of disasters on Amour Chaleur in the future.
- Do not upload an image with the same name as any of the page/posts slugs. It might screw up the URL. I lost an entire page together with 60 over comments recently.
- Check the support forum to see if there’s any major issues with the newest upgrade before deciding whether to upgrade or not.
- Backup WordPress database before upgrading to a newer version.
- Deactivate all plugins before upgrading especially if the site is running many plugins. This will reduce any issues or problems with upgrading. When I upgraded from 2.8.6 to 2.9, I got a memory limit error and it was fixed when I deactivated all my plugins.
- When there’s anything wrong with WordPress permalinks, go to the settings page and “save changes” to refresh the permalinks. This usually works for me.
- If you have edited any of the core/plugin files, remember to note down which file/line of code you have edited before upgrading. It’s best to backup the files before upgrading just in case you cannot remember which file had been amended.
- If it’s possible to avoid using plugins – avoid. The website loads faster when there are lesser plugins running. This is a fantastic tutorial to output Flickr RSS feed without the use of a plugin.
- When things go wrong with a plugin and no changes were made recently5, leave it alone for a while, even plugins need a break sometimes. It may just works again later.
- If there’s a page template with the same name as a page, the page will automatically use that page template. In this case, it is not possible to switch to the default template.
- When posting “fake” comments6 to test the commenting system, published a new private post for it if the comments subscription plugin is running. This prevents spamming7 those who have subscribe to your posts with emails.
- Confession (2005), Liberta (2005 – early 2008) and Amour Chaleur (December 2008 – present) [«]
- I’m exaggerating this but it does have a lot of features! [«]
- If you have not, you really should. I’m nice (kidding)! [«]
- I have messed up my WordPress platform at least 4 times during 2010 and it’s only February now [«]
- There are no plugins/WordPress upgrades and the settings had not been changed. [«]
- Sometimes I do this to make sure that the commenting system is working correctly after I made changes to the comments template or activated some new comments plugins [«]
- I am so sorry to Cherlynn and whoever received the emails with all the “tests” contents [«]
11 September, 2011 at 6:01 am
Very good post! I will be also likely to write a blog post about this… cheers
5 July, 2011 at 10:47 pm
WordPress’ one-click upgrade was the most fantastic advance. It also goes for the plugins too. Always remember to do a backup just in case though!
1 May, 2010 at 2:53 pm
WordPress is the best blogging platform ever. It is much better than Typepad and blogspot.*;-
2 September, 2011 at 6:00 am
I’ve been using various “free web builder” services but I’ve just been shown WordPress by a friend and it looks so much easier. I’m definitely going to try it.
3 February, 2010 at 11:28 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Dayna and Dayna, ????. ???? said: WordPress lessons 101 – http://bit.ly/acwbjH [...]
3 February, 2010 at 12:47 am
Wow I’ve been pretty lucky with wordpress. Never had any problems with it.
Going to definitely start backing it up before I upgrade, I’ve noticed many people have that problem
3 February, 2010 at 12:28 am
Aww I hope you won’t get any more trouble with your wordpress installation. I’ve also been with WordPress for about 5 years now. Even though there are so many features I still manage a lot of things ‘manually’. For example I still use FTP software to upload images and posts are all hardcoded in HTML
Fortunately I haven’t had much trouble with WordPress. I hope you won’t have more trouble with it either ~
3 February, 2010 at 10:21 am
I use FTP as well for updating themes file etc. However, I rarely upload images via FTP unless I am overriding them. I find it easier to upload it via the upload feature on WordPress. I do not use the WYSIWYG editor as well because it messes up my code.
2 February, 2010 at 6:51 pm
I am getting those memory errors very often, mostly when I try to install new plugins or upload new images for a post. Quite annoying…Will remember to deactivate my plugins before upgrading the next time.
2 February, 2010 at 7:33 am
I’ve been fairly lucky with WP in all the time that I’ve used it. I find comfort in the fact that I make backups regularly so I can fall back on them if all else goes wrong!
2 February, 2010 at 5:25 am
Well, the good news is, I haven’t really noticed whenever your blog was messed up!
Luckily, I’ve only had one problem with Textpattern, and that’s when comments randomly stopped working. I backed up my databases, reinstalled Textpattern, and voila! Everything worked again. However, the experience didn’t leave me with any notes to follow for the future to prevent a similar problem…
2 February, 2010 at 3:10 pm
I’m glad to know that! I usually try to fix it as soon as possible before anyone notice it. =D
I hope I don’t have to do the same thing with WordPress ever. It is such a huge blogging platform to reinstall. The last time I needed to do something like this when I moved hosts, Holdfire did it for me!
2 February, 2010 at 5:07 am
I will have to bookmark this entry, because I always have tons of trouble with WordPress. I am so glad that you decided to put your personal notes online.
2 February, 2010 at 4:19 am
I’m rather famous for being “un-adventurous” too. Charting my progress CMS wise, I’ve done really rather poorly. I’m not even on to “WordPress Level” yet. It took me pain and agony to switch from Cutenews, an embarrassment I hasten to forget and it’ll take me even more time to switch from FanUpdate. I’ve tried Joomla but creating your own themes for it took real gut, gut which I don’t have!
2 February, 2010 at 7:08 am
You might want to be careful with Fanupdate. It’s banned by most hosts because it’s a high security risk.
Joomla’s definitely one of the more “advanced” CMS, but WordPress is quite simple compared to it. Check out this list: http://designm.ag/resources/simple-cms/
2 February, 2010 at 4:44 pm
Thanks for sharing the list of other CMS.
I have heard from other bloggers that TextPattern, Habari and Chyrp are more light weight as compared to WordPress.
3 February, 2010 at 2:35 pm
Hmm, you guys are encouraging me to make the move to WordPress. I might give it a go when I put my next website layout up which is soon. Thank you! That list might come in handy.
2 February, 2010 at 3:12 pm
I have heard about security risks concerning both Cutenews and FanUpdate. WordPress should be pretty easy to move since it has the “import” feature now. When I was moving from b2 to WordPress a long time ago, I had to do it manually since the import feature wasn’t available at that time. It was a pain in the butt!
2 February, 2010 at 2:46 am
This was the very reason why I chose to switch back to blogger. The frequency of new WordPress upgrades are a little too speedy for me and I thought it wasn’t worthwhile to expend my energy on constantly upgrading my cms instead of really blogging. That’s just my case though.
I understand your need to use WP for the various pages and plugins you keep and I hope the next upgrade will be a painless one!
2 February, 2010 at 3:22 pm
The newer versions of WordPress has the “one-click” automatic upgrade so it’s actually simple and fast, that’s if you don’t have many plugins running like me. :P