WordPress 2.3.1 = Legacy Blog Plugin Killer November 21, 2007
Posted by Andrew Wee in : blogging , trackbackIf you’ve recently upgraded to WordPress 2.3.1, you could have either the best blogging experience if you’re a new user, or one of the worst, if you’ve been using WordPress for some time.
A key reason is mentioned on the WP-Testers list by Ryan Boren, one of the developers:
“The big schema change is the dropping of the categories, post2cat, and link2cat changes in favor of the new terms, term_taxonomy, and term_relationship tables. Any plugin that queries against the old table will break horribly.”
What this means is that the new WordPress has shifted its data structure from a category-basedsystem to a new taxonomy.
If you’ve extensively used category-based plugins to enhance your SEO or social marketing efforts, you’ll bang into lots of error messages, as anyone who’s posted a comment on this blog will attest to.
Given the number of social-based plugins I’ve installed, and the extent to which they interface with the old (now defunct) category-based data strcuture, you can expect to see lots of errors like “WordPress database error: [Table 'blog_wrdp24.wp_post2cat' doesn't exist]“
Even better, I don’t receive email notifications of pending comments now…
So, it’s no wonder that some have called WordPress 2.3.1 the “blog plugin killer”
It does represent an evolution of the blogging platform, with the inclusion of native tagging support, although many bloggers have commented that it’s doesn’t hold a candle to mature tagging plugins like Simple Tagging and Ultimate Tag Warrior.
Still, it’s early days yet, so keep your fingers crossed that that WordPress development team will launch their own plugin enhancements or an incremental upgrade soon.
For more information, you can check out this WordPress.org thread.
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I could hold off on the upgrade thing for a bit.
At least till for a while.
I’ve got to upgrade one of my blogs today. I’m not looking forward to it :0
I upgraded my blog before checking if all plugins I want actually work with the new version. The ugliest surprise was that my Best Articles page was blown away, because the pluging which generated it doesn’t work anymore, and I’m not so much of a php programmer as to change the plugin myself.
I also see the errors you are mentioning, every time I want to save a post before publishing.
It’s not too bad if you audit your plugins one at a time and find out which is breaking your blog.
When you have 30+ plugins and not enough time, you might have to hobble along for a while…