And so over the weekend I did a little bit of shopping for a new web host. I’d been looking for a new web host for a long while, it’s just that this weekend I decided that it would be done, and so I signed up and the new server is online.
I decided to take the opportunity to move WordPress around. My web home directory was getting a little cluttered, and some organization would certainly not harm performance. So I chucked the latest WordPress install (via SVN) that I had into /wp, and did a transfer of MySQL using mysqldump.
As any of you know who have tried this before, this can be a painful process. But I was prepared. There are Codex articles explaining some things that you might need to do to accomplish this process.
So I was in the middle of transferring files when the WP team released WordPress 1.5.1. And half of the plugins I’ve written broke on all of the websites that they’re installed on.
Most of the problem has to do with get_currentuserinfo() and the new 1.5.1 pluggable functions. In short, pluggable functions allow plugins to replace certain key features of WordPress (authentication/login mechanisms, for example) with their own processes. On the whole, this is cool. For my plugins, it isn’t.
And so I ran as fast as I could to update the server and get those plugins back online and get patches available. I’m still working on that. BAStats (which I’ll remind you is still not intended for general use!) is still a little broken, but since I can actually run it on the new server, I’ll be releasing a better tested version soon.
And you know what took the least time to upgrade? WordPress itself. I just got the download file on the server and unzipped it. Done.
One thing you really need WordPress 1.5.1 for is the options page update. It lets more than one plugin insert working options pages into the admin panel. This is important if you want to run FetchRSS (a new plugin that should be released soon) with BAStats (which may never see release at this rate).
So things are still a little sketchy around here server-wise, but WordPress is as solid as ever. Rather than just telling you “there it is”, I’m also going to emphasize “go get it”, since it has a lot of fixes and a few nice little patches that you can’t do without.
