May 29

WordPress upgrade renders a reader’s post slugs unchangable and permalinks stuck in default format despite custom settings

Can you help my reader, Steven, who wrote in to me with the following problem?

I have recently upgraded to WordPress 2.7.1 from 2.6.

I was creating pages with wp 2.6. Underneath the post title was displayed the “url” or permalink, and I could edit and customize it any way I liked.

Now with wp 2.7.1, no matter what I enter in the page slug box, my new pages’ permalinks are always in the default format, ie the ugly permalinks with the numeric ids (despite that my permalink settings are set to ‘custom’). The old pages created with wp 2.6 are unaffected.

I have been struggling and researching for the past 5 hours and still can’t get it to work. I’ve read that there are some problems with ‘category slugs’ meant for posts, but so far I have not found any feedback about page slug or page permalinks.

Please help me.

Unfortunately, I’ve no suggestions for Steven with today’s Reader Question (RQ) — can YOU help him?

Please provide any and all suggestions in the comments section! Thanks from both myself and Steven for any assistance you can provide.

Jan 25

Hold off on upgrading to WordPress 2.1 for a bit..

Denis de Benardy (the creator of the Semiologic Pro theme and many of the amazing WordPress plug-ins used here on How To Blog) sent off the following warning to his mailing list and kindly allowed me to quote him here:

Hello all,

I’m getting a rather large number of emails related to WordPress 2.1, so I figured I’d send this short notice.

Subtle yet very real changes occurred in the Database schema. Anything that relies on a post’s status (page/post, draft/published), in particular, is subject to hard to spot bugs. e.g. post lists, comment lists, etc.

A couple of options also disappeared with almost zero notice. Plugins that rely on them (and many do) will invariably be broken. Again, this may or may not occur with obvious bugs.

In the end, do NOT upgrade WP 2.1 immediately! There is no rush, as in security issues in need of fixing. And this update can potentially break many blogs if not dealt with properly.

A Semiologic Pro update with WordPress 2.1 will occur next week or so. But not before I feel things are stable enough for a proper release.

Thanks for reading!

Denis

He gives good advice…

Jan 22

WordPress 2.1 released today

I’m sorry that, for personal reasons, it’s been just about forever since my last post. I hope to change that in the future.

In the meantime, a number of minor WordPress releases have come and gone – but today the next major revision of WordPress, version 2.1 (aka “Ella”), has been released. In addition to some 500+ bug fixes, it is purported to have more efficient database code which basically means “it’s faster” (a good thing!). On top of that, WordPress 2.1 also includes a bunch of new features and enhancements, including autosave, a tabbed editor for easy switching between WYSIWYG and coding, the ability to make pages private (or save them as drafts – finally!), search engine privacy options, spell checking and much more. Get the details over at wordpress.org.

They finally updated the upgrade instructions in the Codex to reflect the latest version — but you should probably wait before you upgrade to WordPress 2.1!

If you do updgrade, please let me know how smoothly it went for you. Thanks!

Jun 13

Has anyone else had trouble editing any of their existing posts in WordPress 2.0.2?

The last couple of times that I tried to update my wordpress theme list, when I click ‘Save’ (or Save and Continue Editing) there is a long wait after which I get presented with a blank page. Upon then checking the post it hasn’t been updated. This is driving me nuts as I have almost 100 new wordpress themes to add to the list! I am not using the TinyMCE editor, and instead using straight html code. When I try updating the post from blogjet, it comes back with an error message saying, “Error posting to blog: the xml-rpc server returned an empty resonse.”

What gives? I have no problem creating new posts. But the one post I need to edit the most frequently won’t let me update it!

Update: I found numerous posts about this problem in the wordpress support forums, but no real solutions. Of course, wordpress.org is currently taking another lunch break so I can’t link to them for ya at the moment. HOWEVER, on the plus side, I did finally get wordpress to allow me to update my theme list (made a few slight mods to the html for the page — really shouldn’t have made a difference and frankly I don’t know why it didn’t work and why it does now…I’m just glad its working finally!)

Jun 12

Updated my WordPress Theme List – now listing 960 wordpress themes!

My WordPress Theme List has been updated — and while I wasn’t sure if we would cross the 900 mark, turns out we’re only 40 themes away from 1000 free wordpress themes available for download!!!

Way to go to all of the wordpress theme authors!!