Alaska’s Best SEO

First things first….

Right now there is no real reason to upgrade.  There aren’t security fixes, or the like in 2.3.  The changes between 2.2 and 2.3 are the following:

• Canonical URLs.  Our number one reason for you to move to 2.3. If your WP is in a subdirectory (www.myawesomesite.com/wp) then you’re OK search engine wise…however if your blog is the root (www.myawesomesite.com) or a subdomain (subdomain.myawesomesite.com), you will be penalized by search engines for having duplicate content!!!!  Basically…in earlier versions of wordpress, http://www and http:// are not canonical so that in the eyes of the search engines, you have TWO websites with duplicate content which will have you removed (right now you need to load a plugin, or set your .htacces to correct it)!
• Links and posts are finally separated (if you use the blogroll it was considered a post and searchable as such).
• Pending review for content, allowing the site owner to have contributing authors but maintain editorial control.
• Housekeeping was another big one. Code formatting and style were also cleaned up.
• Several bundled libraries were updated to their latest versions at time of release (i.e. TinyMCE – the core visual input tool now has spell check).
• Post and page management was also improved. Managing your draft and private posts and pages is now much easier.
• Plugin maintenance. If the plugin is registered, the plugin admin screen will alert you to updates.
• Native tagging support which has been significantly lacking and required one to three plugins to incorporate.

In making some of these changes, the developers had to restructure the database and this is where the problems come in.  If your theme or plugin isn’t 2.3 compatible it could cause you MAJOR headaches.

Luckily WP is listing the compatible (and incompatible) plugins for 2.3: http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Plugin_Compatibility/2.3. For the most part, your theme should not cause problems, but here is a list of compatibles: http://codex.wordpress.org/Themes/Theme_Compatibility/2.3, especially if you want to implement tags.

However the lists above are as people alert the codex, so to still be sure we recommend you load and run this amazing plugin: http://smithsrus.com/downloads/wordpress-upgrade-preflight-check/.  We can tell you, if we had found this first…it’d have saved us several hours of headaches.

So…here is what we recommend now after all our experiences with upgrading:

Backup your database (you are backing up your database regularly right?!?)!  If not or you can’t with your hosting service, there are two plugins that do this VERY well from within WP: http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup/ and if you want more control (as well as some db maintenance abilities): http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php (WP-DBmanager).

With a little preplanning the migration should be fairly smooth.  Just remember to have a good backup of your WP files and database in case you need to revert.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Contributors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.