by Gaz
WordPress 2.2.2 vs K2 Theme
1:00 am in Announcements by Gaz
After holding out for more than 2 months for a new release of 3ColumnK2 (the WordPress theme that controls the look and feel of this blog) before upgrading to the latest WordPress release, and seeing very little indication that anything will be forthcoming in the near future, I decided to bite the bullet, upgrade WordPress and deal with the fallout…
Round 1
WordPress 2.2 now bundles it’s own implementation of sidebar widgets, which clash with the sidebar widgets implementation in K2 based themes. After upgrading WordPress, I went to the admin pages to upgrade the SQL tables only to be met by a fatal error before the upgrade button even appeared on screen.
3ColumnK2 takes a severe beating, barely able to stay on its feet when the bell rings… Round 1 to WordPress.
Round 2
I found and installed Disable WordPress Widgets plugin, designed to work around this very problem. Of course I would need to get to the plugin management admin page of my installation to activate the plugin, but since everything is displaying fatal errors right now, it’s hard to make any headway.
3ColumnK2 finds a new lease of energy and rocks WordPress2.2 with a plucky rally, soon paying for its overconfidence and forced back against the ropes to take another brutal assault. Round 2 to WordPress.
Round 3
Noting that the fatal error is just a symbol clash in wp-include/widgets.php, I logged into the host server and systematically renamed the symbols causing the errors, returning to the admin dashboard page to be greeted with a fresh symbol to rename and a new fatal error each time. Several symbol iterations later, the WordPress Dashboard finally rendered in my browser.
Not to be downtrodden, 3ColumnK2 fights back gaining a little ground with each volley. It looks like WordPress2.2 hasn’t got any tricks left, and is starting to look a little shaken when the bell rings. Round 3 to 3ColumnK2 by a nose.
Round 4
Having carefully saved a copy of the unedited wp-include/widgets.php, I enabled the Disable WordPress Widgets plugin, and restored the copy. Returning to the upgrade page, I was able to successfully complete the SQL table upgrades and have a fully functioning WordPress2.2 running my hacked 3CK2 theme.
WorPress2.2′s legs are looking a bit shaky by now, when 3ColumnK2 sneaks a lucky left-hook through WordPress’s defences dropping him to the canvas. Winner by TKO: 3ColumnK2.
Conclusion
Azazil is now running properly (or at least, no worse than before) on the latest security patched release of WordPress, and feels a little snappier for it on my client. The speed of the site is really bothering me now though, so I’m going to start ruthlessly cutting back on the modules I use, in an attempt to squeeze some responsiveness out of the server. If there’s anything you’re especially attached to, let me know in the comments and I’ll move it to the back of the line for summary execution. ;-)
Hi James,
I too followed the upgrade instructions, and disabled my plugins. The problem was that I should have installed (and activated) the Disable WordPress Widgets plugin before starting my upgrade, to avoid the sidebar clashes I experienced.
Looking at the K2 Subversion Log, it looks as though K2 proper has addressed the WordPress-2.2 issue, but 3CK2 only syncs occasionally and (for at least the version I’m running) hasn’t picked compatibility with the latest WordPress. Oddly, the Disable WordPress Widgets plugin mentions that the very latest K2 has regressed and needs careful upgrading again…
I lost all my sidebar widget plugins during the upgrade from WordPress 2.0 to 2.1, and gave some thought to finding a faster blog engine… but converting all my content was too much work (especially as I’m hopeless at SQL). At some point I want to introduce a new theme, but that will have to wait until I have some more free time on my hands…
Cheers, Gary
Gary,
I didn’t have too much trouble upgrading my WordPress & 3K2. Thinking back, the upgrade instructions mentioned something about de-activating plugins before installation, so i did it. So i presumably avoided most of the errors, hehe.
Annoyingly after upgrading i had to re-do the widgets on my blog. This was made slightly more annoying as 3K2′s widget system was that bit slightly different than WordPress’.
A week or two after i switched over to Mephisto, which out of the box has a rather nice & simple caching system that allows you to completely avoid executing scripts (basically writes a .html file in an appropriate location in the web root so it doesn’t 404 and call the script), unless you post a comment or search or go to the admin panel.
Plus administration was simple & to the point. Although on on the negative side, it was in a few ways too simple (e.g. no widgets plugin, so you have to do your sidebar widgets in a template).
Speed-wise though, as with WordPress it depends a lot on what you have in your page. Although on the plus side the next major release of Ruby will have a bytecode compiler which (like accelerators you can get for PHP) should speed things up a bit.