Wordpress upgrade

Elizabeth March 30th, 2008

Thanks to the few people who sent me concerned emails today when they noticed my site was looking screwy. Something broke when I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5, and it took about an hour to get everything running again. It’s funny how it only takes 10 mins to upgrade Wordpress 4 out of 5 times, but the exception to the rule is always a massive shitfight.

Anyway, I’m so far quite impressed with the latest version, except for two things. The first (minor) annoyance is the ugly colour scheme, which will no doubt be tinkered with further down the line. The second issue is a bit more serious, and I imagine it has affected other bloggers out there even more than me.

The first sign that something was wrong was when my 101 Things in 1001 Days page led me to a 404. None of the other pages were broken, so I assumed that something was screwy in my database. Strangely, I could edit the page without any problems from the Wordpress Dashboard, so I knew the page itself wasn’t damaged.

Further experimentation has led me to believe that this version of Wordpress cannot handle numerical URLs properly. Here’s the URL of my 1001 Days page:

http://www.scarletwords.com/1001/

I experimented with a couple of other pages, changing their “page slug” to numerals. Here’s what happened:

http://www.scarletwords.com/elizabeth/harry/
This URL performs well.

http://www.scarletwords.com/elizabeth/123/
Changing the previous page slug from “harry” to “123″ confused it into displaying /elizabeth

As far as bugs go, it could be more serious. However, I’m in a situation where /1001 happens to be the most linked-to URL on my website, and changing it would be fairly damaging as far as traffic is concerned.

Workarounds include setting up redirects and updating all my internal links (which is a big job, as I link to it often in posts), but I imagine that this is beyond the scope of some of the more popular blogs. I’ve decided to live with the 404 error for the next day or so while I try to investigate a real solution.

It should be noted that URLs with number and letter combinations work fine, such as my 100facts page.

Has anyone else come across this bug? Heard of any solutions? I’ll update this post later with any information I find.

5 Responses to “Wordpress upgrade”

  1. # Michael Auliaon 31 Mar 2008 at 1:09 pm

    Ugh sounds bad.. I’m planning to upgrade it later today. Hope I don’t get any surprises!

    PS: Hope you like Melbourne more than Brisbane ^^

  2. # Fionaon 31 Mar 2008 at 10:52 pm

    Hey Elizabeth,

    @markdavidson from twitter had serious problems yesterday. He blogged about it too: http://twitterstars.com/?p=44

    Good luck!

  3. # Zoëon 04 Apr 2008 at 1:48 am

    I don’t know if this will help, but I recently had some trouble with URLs when I changed my permalink settings and it was because my .htaccess file wasn’t writeable. Could this be the problem?

    If not, good luck sorting it out! :)

  4. # Entrepreneuron 04 Apr 2008 at 5:19 pm

    Haven’t made the shift yet … even more scared to do it now after your story.

  5. # daltonon 07 Jun 2008 at 7:26 am

    I posted a response to your query on the WordPress forums. I hope the advice is helpful.

    By the way, if you hate the admin color scheme as much as I did, you might want to try my Monochrome Admin Plugin.

    Regards,
    Dalton

Trackback URI | Comments RSS

Leave a Reply