A Few Notes on Updating UMW Blogs to WordPress 3.5

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The upgrade process for WordPress has been so seamless the last three or four versions that I didn’t realize how spoiled I’ve been until I finally had an issue (and even that was quite simple to resolve).  Between automatic updates for plugins, themes, and core files, WordPress has nailed the convenience end of upgrades, and that’s no small thing—just ask anyone who has to upgrade a Mediawiki install :)

UMW Blogs did have one hangup going from 3.4.2 to 3.5 with the SharDB plugin. It was throing the following error:

Warning: array_search() expects parameter 2 to be array, null given in /home/umwblogs/public_html/wp-content/db.php on line 250

Luke Waltzer had the same issue on Blogs@Baruch, so I knew I was in good company :)  And, as is always the case, Ron Rennick (the original author of the plugin) was on it. (Ron and Andrea deserve every bit of kudos they get from the WordPress community and more.) He fixed the issue in the db.php file for the plugin and noted he would update the trunk at some point. But in the interim if you have an issue getting it to work leave a comment and I’ll post the code I’m using.

What’s nice about moving to 3.5 is that we can once again use dsader’s now out-of-print 3-in-1 widget to display recent posts on the front page of UMW Blogs, which is pulling off the http://tags.umwblogs.org blog. We’ve had performance issues with this one before, so we have to watch it pretty close for load spikes.

Another issue that was just brought to my attention is that WordPress 3.5 begins the phase out of the Links Manger. I hadn’t heard about this yet—I need to read up on new releases better :) —so I installed and network activated Andrew Nacin’s Links Manager plugin in the interim until I figure out how this might effect folks on UWM Blogs. To be clear, if you were using Links Manger before the upgrade that functionality is still intact from what I understand, it is all new blogs that are created won’t have it as a visible option.

Other that that, UMW Blogs is once again running on the latest and greatest for the new semester. If anyone else knows of any issues we should be aware of I’d love to hear em.

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