WordPress 2.05 – Ronan – Permalinks Issue

So, WordPress 2.05 (Ronan) came out while I was asleep and I’ve just finished upgrading 3 sites to it, including my blog.

Upgrading was relatively painless, although there was a minor issue which could cause you some issues if your not savvy to it: WordPress 2.05 can alter your permalink structure which can leave links unreachable.

When your upgrading (always make sure you back up) the “read me” states:

Before you upgrade anything, make sure you have backup copies of any files you may have modified such as index.php.

Upgrading from any previous WordPress to 2.0:

1. Delete your old WP files, saving ones you’ve modified
2. Upload the new files
3. Point your browser to /wp-admin/upgrade.php
4. You wanted more, perhaps? That’s it!

Now, if you delete all your files, you’ll probably delete your .htaccess file as well. This is okay (as long as you haven’t any handwritten code in there), as you’ll be uploading the default one anyway.

I always do this, and after upgrading go straight into the OPTIONS – PERMALINKS menu and click the “Update Permalink Structure” button. This rebuilds the permalinks file and everything is hunky dory!

I normally have my permalink structure set to date and name based, so that it looks like this:

http://pauloflaherty.com/2006/10/29/sample-post/

However, after upgrading it was set to something different that would have made it be more like (now this isn’t exact as I’m working from memory):

http://pauloflaherty.com/archives/2006/sample-post/

This happened on 2 out of the 3 upgrades I did this morning, so I can only assume that other people may notice this as well.

On another note there are one or two nice things about WordPress 2.05 (besides the security updates) that I quite like.

The first is the fact that plugins are now listed according to the plugin name as opposed to the filename of the plugin. Far more sensible.

Second, and perhaps less noticed is that the Akismet plugin that ships with WordPress now has the spam broken down into pages, so that you can see it all instead of just the first hundred or so. This is an important upgrade in terms of identifying false positives in your spam filter.

One change I would like to see in the Akismet plugin would be to have the links to the pages at both the bottom and the top of each page. It’s a pain in the backside to have to scroll back up to the top of the page every time.