WordPress 2.3 Upgrade HorrAH

Filed under: Tech

Posted 1 year, 3 months ago at 8:37 pm. 1 comment

Like many others, I was excited about the built-in tagging support in WordPress 2.3 and had to upgrade right away. As a safety measure, I backed up the database and thank goodness I did that. Long story short: I used the Categories to Tags Converter function and it deleted all my categories. My theme, the link asides hack and some plugins depended on categories, which means my blog was broken.

Time to restore the database. The backup I made earlier was a 80Mb SQL instruction text file. 80 Mb of text. The first import attempt failed because of a few offending rows in falbum_cache. Fine, it’s called cache so I don’t need it. As I searched for the particular rows, I found pages and pages of falbum_cache. I removed all those data row and the .sql file was down to 2 Mb.

That made me think I shouldn’t continue to use falbum if it will blow up my database again. Since my db was in front of me in plain text, I might as well replace all the falbum links with the original Flickr ones. That was not too hard.

Time to import again. Everything seemed to work fine and my site was back to normal, but wait, all the Japanese/Chinese characters were garbled. After a bit of googling, I found out all the tools I used in this hideous process did not support UNICODE. The db dumper that exported the .sql, the text editor I used on my Mac and the SQL import function on my web server, none of them handled the utf-8 encoding properly.

So I repeated the process all over again with the right tools, and now my blog looks normal as if I have done no work at all.

P.S.1 WP2.3 breaks a few other widgets/plugins, but I really can’t care less now.
P.S.2 So categories or tags? I will stick with my old categories for now until I find a non-destructive way to convert them.

Tags: Website Updates