info.michael-simons.eu

Wordpress 2.2 arrived a day ago.
Updating was no problem at all. Prominent new features are wigdet support without the need for an external plugin and a working atom 1.0 feed.

I could drop two plugins: the widget plugin and the atom10 plugin. Nice. All others work as before (some important to mention are UTW, WP-Cache and the nice extended live archive(*).

A really nice site effect of the update: the WP Team finally managed to put a “SET NAMES blah” into wp-db.php, so that setting “UTF-8” i.e. in wp-admin really means UTF-8 in the database. I always hacked my wp-db(**) for my other blog planet-punk.de, since there are a lot of old posts from another legacy system that _are_ indeed UTF-8 but which where maltransformed by wp without that hack before 2.2.

I do have a local development system on my mac but i tend to test things twice or more often. Other people maybe don’t have or want that luxury and need to udate their blogs directly on the server. Either way, it’s a good idea, to put your blog to maintenance while updating your wp core files. This is easily accomplished with .htacess and mod_rewrite. First create a file “maintenance.html” for your visitors. Than look up your external ip and add the following to your .htaccess:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !87.78.68.17 [NC]
RewriteRule ! maintenance.html$ maintenance.html [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

and replace 87.78.68.17 with your external ip. Remember commenting these entries when you’re done.

(*) If you have any questions about my plugins, don’t hesitate to ask, i just don’t want a plugin list in case of bugs in any plugin.

(**) The hack was: Add the following to __construct in your wp-db.php (./wp-includes/) :

	$this->select($dbname);
	$this->query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");