With the recent release of WordPress 3.3, “Sonny”, there would most likely be issues during the upgrade process for some site administrators and deployers.

WordPress.org’s forum has a “master list” of tips and tricks to try to resolve those issues, preferably before filing an issue ticket with them.

Of course, if you’re going to undertake an upgrade, you should take the necessary precautions of backing up your site (including the database) first!

Here’s a nice post by Jane Wells (yes, the one of WordPress fame) about the requirements for WordPress 3.2 and some rationale about the system changes being implemented for the latest version of the blogging software.

The big news is actually not that big: the version of Oracle’s [ORCL] MySQL database and the PHP engine have been locked in at recent versions:

• MySQL 5.0 or higher
• PHP 5.2.4 or higher

For most site hosting services, this is not a problem. In fact, a lot of the services have been actively pushing their customers to upgrade their Web applications to PHP 5 and recent versions of MySQL for years. But a significant, popular software package like WordPress has enough impetus to push the holdout administrators over to more modern versions.

A new security/fix version of WordPress, 3.0.5, has been released today, as mentioned by Andrew Nacin. While it may seem like a small release, it provides some useful security patches that all WordPress systems should have.

As mentioned by Matt on his blog, Automattic has taken the big leap into domain-registrarhood.

Since WordPress.com and Automattic are inexorably tied to the blogging experience, as witnessed by the myriad of blog and blog-like sites built using the WordPress software and also hosted at the eponymous WordPress.com service, it is natural that Automattic eventually extend its reach into providing a more full-service attention toward having a more customized domain name, rather than merely:

• {name}.wordpress.com
  • where {name} represents the sub-domain name picked by the blog owner/user

Also, people who are comfortable in their dealings with Automattic will appreciate their domain registration services in the near future.

Unfortunately, the domain registration tools are not yet available online, according to Matt; so we’ll just have to wait patiently while he and his team work on it.

Just in the nick of time (well, actually, merely before the end of July), the first maintenance release for WordPress 3.0 became available yesterday. This provides some bug fixes (over 50) that were discovered since the 3.0 release, or were relegated to a lower status to not impede that major release.

If you have not yet upgraded to WordPress 3.0, you should consider taking the plunge to 3.0.1… it provides a cumulative upgrade path. However, keep in mind that you should still assess whether you have older code modifications, plugins, and themes that may no longer work with WordPress during your upgrade.

N.B.

Other related Javamancy posts (in reverse chronological order):

• Introducing WordPress 3.0
• Stop the Insanity! Or, WordPress Development for 2010, a New Year’s Resolution

Other articles of interest:

• WordPress 3.0.1 (WordPress.org)
• Version 3.0.1 (Codex @ WordPress.org)

If you have been following along about the upcoming PHP and MySQL upgrade requirements for WordPress, you may have wondered, “Hey, is my WordPress site ready for the upgrade?”

There is a way to tell (more-or-less conveniently): try the Health Check plugin for WordPress. While the description for the plugin declares that there will be more checks in the future, it currently looks at your PHP and MySQL version numbers to see if you are ready for the upgrade.

As many of you know, WordPress depends upon a variety of software packages to do the things that it does, as a weblog product (and some of you have extended it even further…). Two of these things are foundational items: PHP, the language and operational runtime for WordPress, and MySQL, the persistence datastore that WordPress uses.

Both of these are being incremented upward to more current versions.

For many WordPress  administrators, this will not be a dramatic issue, other than confirming your settings with your site host; some may require some configuration switches being “flipped” to use PHP 5.2 and MySQL 5.0.15. There may even be some adjustments to your site’s php.ini file.

However, if you’re a big-time hacker, and you’ve been coding in some changes to the base WordPress package (and who doesn’t these days, right?), then you will need to ensure that your code has not been exploiting some of the PHP 4 quirks that have changed in PHP 5 syntax: you will have to rewrite or redesign those parts of your code. For some developers, this endeavor may not be trivial.

On the other hand, the MySQL upgrade is generally better tolerated, since a lot of PHP developers tend to use the provided MySQL connector API. Again, however, if you are one of those who enjoys spinning up your own, parallel data persistence API or are using another package in addition to the WordPress one, you will have to ascertain the LoE for modifying your code. Also, if you have crafted some stored procedures for your MySQL 4 instance(s), you may have to re-implant them into your waiting MySQL 5 instance(s) once they are ready. Code-wise, it should be a straightforward import for most developers.

N.B.

Further reading of interest:

• PHP
• MySQL (now owned by Oracle)
• WordPress

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words would a video (and even one that is available in HD format, too) be worth?

Resolve this quandary for yourself, and watch this video on the new features in WordPress 3.0, which is now available.

You may have noticed that we’re starting to use the Tell.im service in some of our links, including in this post.

What is Tell.im?

It is a URL shortening service, similar to many of the others floating around that help to take a very long URL and dramatically chop-it-down-to-a-shorter-length (hopefully). This will make some of our outbound links more uniform and reasonably shorter, so they are ready-to-digest by other services like Twitter. When you activate a Tell.im link, you are redirected by Tell.im to the real destination, whatever that may be.

Admittedly, this may make trackbacks and pingbacks toward Javamancy and other blogs unsightly or unavailable, depending on the other systems’ ability to follow and manage transitive linking.

N.B.

Other related Javamancy mini posts (in reverse chronological order):

• Tell.IM is Now Tell.im
• Tell.im Activity is Becoming Noticeable…

Yesterday, WordPress 2.9.2 was released to correct a bug in which “trashed” blog posts are visible by potentially unauthorized users.

According to Ryan, this can occur when logged-in users attempt to browse the trash area; these users can view posts that belong to others, so sensitive or private information may be inappropriately accessible. Thomas Mackenzie first mentioned this on his blog a few days ago (with a lot of interesting details). An “unofficial” WordPress diff patch was posted for it to address the defect, and WordPress 2.9.2 was released shortly afterward in a couple of days.

This is a good upgrade for WordPress sites which allow for multiple users to log into the system and use different authorization levels to govern various user roles.

N.B.

You may have noticed that we’re starting to use the Tell.im URL shortener in some of our links, including in this post…

UPDATE: Thomas points out that this post had incorrectly attributed the unofficial diff patch to him. According to him, it originated from the WordPress folks.