Like tiptoeing down an old flight of stairs. This is how I treat Stellify‘s WordPress backend. Sometimes the creaks are soft; sometimes they are loud. Sometimes I find my leg caught through a hole in the wooden steps, but for situations such as upgrades, I’d rather be cautious.
I’ve upgraded most of the WordPress installations on this domain to the latest version, codename “Ella”, before which the latest 2.0.x releases had whizzed by too quickly, but I stopped short of upgrading this site (and Qwerky). Why?
Plugin Problems
For starters, here are the plugins on these two sites that could possibly be incompatible with WordPress 2.1:
- Category Visibility
- Custom Posts Per Page
- Ultimate Tag Warrior
- Admin Drop Down Menu
- CSS Compress
- Force Word Wrapping
- Inherit Category Template
- Jerome’s Keywords
- Tiger Style Administration
- Quoter
- SimplePie for WordPress
I added the items on the second list to the plugin compatibility page, since it’s in a wiki (and a very nicely integrated one at that).
Theme Dependencies
I was even more anxious after finding out that a good number of plugins that I use and absolutely depend on (mostly for the look and feel of the sites) were not even on the lists. Add that to the fact that some of the plugin code came straight from the WordPress support forums. Yes, copy-paste.
Anyway, these are my patch-ups for the code-red problems around here:
- Custom Posts Per Page: Replace with Custom Query String. CHECK.
- Jerome’s Keywords: No clear solution yet. Even Ultimate Tag Warrior is having some problems.
- Ultimate Tag Warrior: See above.
- SimplePie for WordPress: Use
fetch_rssfunction. CHECK.
Then, I also discovered there’s going to be a lot of changes for WordPress Template Tags and other functions. I’ll have to snoop around those, too.
Qwerky and Kiwi
Aside from plugins, though, I’m worried about the WordPress theme Qwerky is using, which is an older version of Kiwi. Back then, I had no time nor guts to make a custom theme for this “academic” project. Kiwi caught my eye because it had special things already integrated into the theme—featured posts, random header image script, two column posts—to name a few. It was very different from the other themes out there at that time (think Hemingway, but with more stuff in it). Kiwi had since grown into one of the themes of a bigger theming project, Canvas, by the guys at Fresh Pursuits.
At this point, I didn’t really want to upgrade Qwerky’s Kiwi anymore since (1) I really didn’t need Canvas; (2) Canvas seemed to be a bigger version of WordPress Widgets, which was still in its infancy at that time, but was gaining popularity much faster; and (3) I didn’t like to redo all the modifications I had already made. Also, the whole project (Canvas + Kiwi + Fresh Pursuits) has been passed on by its creators to the community, which is just downright unfortunate. This might make n00bs even more intimidated by it.
Now that seems like a bigger stalemate than any of the plugins combined. I guess it’s about time Qwerky got some blog fairydust. Maybe some rounded corners and… and… ad-friendliness? We shall see. Somebody throw me a great theme I can rip apart!
Dissatisfied? Kvetch!
For now, I shall have to content myself with a not-so-new WP version. And, perhaps, along with other disgruntled WordPress users, head over to the Ideas and Kvetch sections and air out our hopes and dreams, wishes and dilemmas, because this time, they want to hear what we say.