While I usually activate all the plugins for a site in one step (RapidFormatter does this for you automatically), whenever I am testing out a significant WordPress upgrade, I prefer to activate the plugins one by one.

I tend to use the following plugins on my various sites:

• RNW AdManager
• Advanced Admin Menus
• Contact Form ][
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
• Enlarger
• Global Translator
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Kimili Flash Embed
• MyBlogLog Widget
• Niche Feed
• Organizer
• Paged Navigation
• Post-Plugin Library
• RNW Breadcrumbs
• RNW Common Routines
• RNW DropCap
• RNW Order Sections
• RNW Page Manager
• RNW Recent Categories
• RNW SEO Optimiser
• RNW Sidebar Widgets
• RNW Zone Manager
• RNW_Redirect
• Role Manager
• Search Hilite
• Similar Posts
• WordPress Database Backup
• WP-Lytebox

A fairly lengty list - and were I to simply activate all the plugins, I would probably get a broken site - with no knowledge of which plugin caused the problem.

RapidFormatter - a key component of the Rapid Niche Websites System - uploads and activates most of these for me whenever I create a site, but sadly with such a major upgrade, I’m going to have to revert back to manual/ individual activation and testing …

So - whenever there is a significant WordPress upgrade, the smart move is to test each plugin - one by one.

The steps I follow:

• Activate the plugin. If I get a message that the plugin was activate, then I test the options page, and then finally the expected functionality of the plugin.
• If the plugin fails to activate, I check the error message provided, and then check back at the plugin’s home page to see if others have reported this probem, and whether there is a solution.
• If the plugin totally disables the site - so that I cannot access the Admin | Plugins page ( this does happen on occasion), then I use my FTP program to disabl, or completely remove the plugin. To disable the plugin, I usually just rename the file extension - from PHP to something else - it can be a simple as PHP1 - which will then restore the functionality of the site.

Over the next few posts I will check each of the plugins listed above - and if necessary, source an updated plugin, or tweak the code of any RNW plugin.

If you have a high traffic, high income site, you might want to consider to setting up a test blog. It only takes a few minutes to set up a new WordPress installation using Fantastico. You can easily set one up in a sub-folder.The steps that I follow for important blogs are:

• Create a new WordPress installation
• Upload the theme
• Upload the plugins
• Activate and test the behaviour of the plugins - one by one.
• If a plugin is incompatible with the version you’re testing, it might totally disable your installation. The trick is to then simply log onto the test folder using a FTP program, and then delete the plugin, or simply change the plugin file’s exention - say from AdsenseManager.php to AdsenseManager.phpOld. It can be anything added to the PHP extension - and it will disable the plugin.
• If I identify an incompatible plugin, then I do a Google search to see if others have found a solution for the problem. Alternatively, I assess if I can omit the plugin from the site - either just for the short ter, or permanently.
• I also add a few quick test posts. I tend to add a couple of posts with the most complex content (multiple DIV tags / CSS settings) to test if the auto formatting of WordPress breaks anything.

If your site is an important site, the few minutes that it takes to set up a test site could be a wise move.

Using RapidFormatter, it’s pretty quick to set up a test blog that replicates your live site.RapidFormatter not only helps you format a blog to look like a website, it:

• uploads the theme
• uploads the plugins, and
• it automatically sets a number of WordPress settings to change the behaviour of the blog to be like a normal website.

As it’s vital that I test each RNW plugin, I have set up a test blog : http://jeff-w.com/wp25/

The first step was to send a theme to the site - using RapidFormatter. I decided to have a little fun, and create a theme for the upgrade process. After uploading the theme with the built-in FTP capability of RapidFormatter, the over-used Kubrick theme was replaced with a more visually appealing RNW theme :

OK - so far so good - nothing is broken with the actual theme …

If you have anything but the most basic of blogs, you’re bound to have a range of plugins installed - possibly assembled over a period of several months as your blogging / site development skills have developed.

One disadvantage of free plugins is that the author has no obligation to support the plugin - and you do get the case where a plugin is abandoned due to WordPress’s evolution breaking the plugin. Some authors just don’t have the time or inclination to provide the ongoing support that is required with this evolving application.

So - there is no guarantee that the latest version of WordPress will work with each of your plugins.

Depending on the amount of traffic you’re currently getting and the value of your site, you should consider the following steps:

• Check the Plugins page in your current installation for update notifications
• Check Each Plugin’s Site

Check The Plugins Page For Updates

A feature that was introduced in WordPress a couple of releases ago was the notification of plugin updates. If a plugin has been updated, and if it is registered with WordPress’s plugins database, you will see see a message indicating so just below the specific plugin:

Of course, just because there is an update available, it doesn’t mean that it is an upgrade that caters for the new version, or that it is bug-free. Also, there are some developers not registered with the WordPress plugin database - so you should always check the plugin’s home page - to see if there are any issues with the plugin working with the latest WordPress version.

Check Each Plugin’s Site

To visit the plugin’s ‘home page’, you can simply click on the name of the plugin - but you will navigate away from your plugin list to the plugin’s URL. I use FireFox as my primary browser, so I right-click on each plugin’s name, and open a new tab for each plugin.

Many plugin ‘homes’ are WordPress blogs - with comments enabled. It’s worthwhile to browse through the latest comments - as this is the quickest way to find out whether there are any problems with the plugin working withh the latest WordPress version.

Download the plugin if there is a new version - and the feedback is that it works with the latest WordPress version. Save it in a folder on your PC - ready for uploading later on during the upgrade process.

I’ve decided to take a leaf out of Matt Levenhagen’s book, and produce a follow-along - as I go through the steps I typically carry out when upgrading a site.

I first saw Matt use this technique when he was first developing his AdWords Campaign Blasts method when he was still part of Web Profit School. The WPS members really enjoyed the approach as it illustrated the steps he carried out to quickly test Adwords Campaigns. BTW - if you’re interested in developing your Adwords skills as well as get general all-round internet marketing insights, you really need to check out Matt’s membership site, XtremeProfits - a site packed with great internet marketing street-smarts, and a friendly, active forum that provides excellent Adwords campaigns coaching.

OK - back to the WordPress 2.5 follow-along.

This will cover some of the code upgrade issues that I need to tackle as the producer of the Rapid Niche Websites System - but this could be useful for WordPress users - as it will give them some clues regarding what to look for if they use a number of plugins to customise their WordPress installation.

RNW Feature : Note the use of the Category Introduction - one of RapidNicheWebsites features. This allows you to add any post as an introduction to a category. Along with the visual benefit of providing a more interesting category page (you could for instance include an image in the intro …), you now also have the ability to allocate SEO-related custom fields - further improving the SEO ranking of the category page.

Upgrading from WordPress 2.3 or earlier, to WordPress 2.5 is not a trivial task - if you have a sophisticated WordPress-based website or blog.

Technical / Coding

The main technical reasons why you might experience problems are the following:

• The Widget format / way of functioning has changed, and so widgets coded to work with Version 2.3 don’t work with WordPress 2.5.
• The menu structure of the Admin section has changed, so this can affect some plugins - in terms of where their option pages attempt to hook into the admin menu.
• If for any reason your plugins allow you to include / exclude Pages, Posts or Categories based on ID numbers (each of these get a unique ID created within WordPress each time you create a Page, Post or Category) - you’re now going to be stuck. Whereas in the past you could always see what the ID number was for any of the main WordPress ‘objects’, these are now no longer displayed - so you cannot apply some of the customisations you might be used to.
• The WYSIWYG editor has changed, so the additional buttons that some plugins attach to the editor toolbars could be affected. (The plugins in RNW have been affected.)

Using WordPress 2.5

From a use perspective, you might also encounter some difficulties:

• The menu structure has changed, so you’re going to need to look for menu items in different places.
• The Post/Page format has changed. I don’t like the fact that the standard format has the page left justified, and it doesn’t span the full width of the page.
• More importantly - some of the droplists located on the RHS of the Post/Page area have been moved below the edit area. This in effect takes these editing functions ‘below the fold’ - and so it is pretty easy to forget to set your Category, or Page template - as these are out of sight (and therefore can be out of mind if you’re in a hurry…).
• The Page/Post / Category lists (in Manage) - no longer have an Edit / Delete link in the list, and the object names are not underlined to indicated that the names are active links, and that is how you access the edit window. I can see a few WordPress newbies staring at these lists wondering how to edit posts they have created …

What’s Good About The Upgrade

It’s not all doom and gloom:

• The one really BIG improvement is that the WYSIWYG editor no longer screws up DIV tag layouts by automatically replacing them with P tags. This was a major source of irritation for me with the previous versions. I like the ease of use of the WYSIWIG editor for general posting, but need the fine-formatting options that wrapping parts of your content in DIV tags allows you to do.
• The post editor ‘remembers’ which format you were in when you do a Save, so if you’re in the Text editor, you don’t have to keep switching back from the WYSIWYG editor after each save.
• The button to open the Advanced Toolbar is on the first toolbar (not hidden on the second as in previous versions), and the toolbar remembers to remain open or closed / based on the setting when you last had the editing section open.
• While the Widgets layout is no longer ‘visual’, the new format makes it much easier, and less messy to create multi-instance widgets. You no longer need to have a droplist indicating how many ‘instances’ of a widget you will be using in your sidebars. You just add the widget as many times as you want, and the code sorts out the unique widget ID - instead of you having to do it manually.
• The Widget format also makes it ‘cleaner’ to add more sidebars. So - if you want to create multi-zoned sites with different sidebars for each zone, the new Widget page will make it easy to do so, without the page becoming cluttered with visual representations of multiple sidebars.

OK - enough of an overview of the WordPress changes. I have no choice but to upgrade, as I have many customers who will that RapidNicheWebsites cater for the latest version. For me, the cleaner handling of DIV tags in the content area is the only incentive would have needed to do the upgrade as soon as possible.

Over the next couple of days, I will be covering the changes that I had to make in RNW, and adjustments I had to make in the way that I use WordPress 2.5 and RapidNicheWebsites.

When I first loaded WordPress 25RC1 a couple of weeks ago, I wasn’t that impressed with what I saw.

Possibly it was because the revised layout meant that I would have to redo a lot of my documentation.
But there were things that were initially a bit irritating - but now they’re growing on me.
For some strange reason the Post area is set to a maxium of 980px, and it sits to the left - so you have WordPress only using some of your screen. Quite easy to fix if you just tweak two CSS settings - so I’ve got rid of at least one annoyance.

The one that I’m not sure I agree with is the moving of the Categories list from the RHS of the post area to ‘below the fold’. I’ve found it easy enough in the past to leave the post allocated to the default category - so having tge Categories list out of site is possibly going to catch out more people that it did in the past.

Ok - those are the two things that I noticed straight away. I then played with the widgets, and saw that the Widgets page had been significantly changed. It is an improvement. The previous versions of WordPress used to create multiple versions of multi-instance widgets, and display them in the Widget’s ‘pool’ below the sidebars. If you had many multi-instance widgets, this area could look quite messy - so the new format is neater, and having a short description per widget should help newbies understand WordPress that much quicker.

The bad news for me, of course, was that the revised widget format meant that my Rapid Niche Websites widgets all needed to be updated. I include a number of these with the RNW System, so this was not a trivial task. Several hours after starting, I’m relieved that I’ve killed that part of the conversion. I now need to work on several plugins that used to hook into the WYSIWG editor - and which now no longer work. No doubt another long session before I can check that task off my list… And when the technology is fixed, my documentation is going to need to be revised …

A coupld of good improvements :

• Speed - the new version certainly is much faster on the test site that I am doing my conversion on.
• The WYSIWYG editor no longer scrambles my embedded DIV tags. Prior versions used to convert any DIV tags into P tags. This very irritating flaw has been sorted out - so it is now possible to use the WYSIWYG editor, and then easily flip to the HTML source - add in a couple of DIV tags, and then revert back to the WYSIWYG mode - without the code being broken. This is really going to help a lot of WordPress users who’ve been unable to quickly insert a positioning DIV tag in a Post due to the former over-zealous code cleanup routines.

So - despite my initial negative impression, I am starting to enjoy the new version. It’s editing behaviour is more predictable, the widgets section is smarter, and the system is faster.

Well done to Matt and his team for once again improving on an already good product.

It was with some relief that I read that the WordPress 2.4 planned release has been cancelled.

You may be aware of the WordPress team’s goal to bring out scheduled releases every 3 months. While it is great that WordPress is getting improved on an ongoing basis, some of the changes can be significant, and then there is turmoil in the WordPress user ranks. Some templates not longer work, and several plugins need revision. Sadly some plugin developers just abandon their plugins.

I compounded the update issue with releasing the Rapid Niche Websites System V-2 at the end of September - which almost coincided with the WordPress 2.3 release. The RNW and WP releases both had significant changes to their respective frameworks, and so the combination of the two resulted in an increased support load. Having just settled everything down, I viewed the end of January with some trepidation, as this was the due date for the WP2.4 release.

Well fortunately the WP programmers needed some time off for the festive season, and so WP 2.4 could not be finished in time. They have taken the sensible decision not to rush the version out the door without adequqte testing, but instead to roll the 2.4 changes into the 2.5 release scheduled for end March 2008.

The Rapid Niche Websites System is now at release 2.2.1 - with several enhancements over the original V-2 (Also addressed a few bug fixes … ). WordPress is at Vsn 2.3.2 - and hopefully will stay there until March.

So - we all have now have some time to concentrate solely on site building and generating traffic, without having to address upgrade and maintenance issues.

The last couple of months have been pretty hectic. Soon after I released Rapid Niche Websites V-2, WordPress released WP2.3. And with this update came a host of conversion issues.

As mentioned in my previous post, the main concern was the scrapping of the Categories table in preference to a more flexible, but more complex Terms taxonomy - which allows more flexibility for further WordPress expansion and enhancements. So with the maturing of WordPress came some temporary pain.

What makes it more complex with such an upgrade is that this affected both plugins and themes. Also, not all hosts upgrade at the same time, and also my customers don’t always update / upgrade all their sites at once, so the ‘fix’ to the Rapid Niche Websites System had to cater for either Version 2.2 or Version 2.3. The coding isn’t too complex to do this - just finicky in that you have to make sure that you apply the fix to each and every plugin and template page affected. It’s so easy to skip a section, but fortunately that has all been accomplished - although not without some grey hairs being added - to both me and my customers … .

So how come we’re now at Vsn 2.2 already?

Well - I’ve been busy …

Based on my own use of the RNW System, plus customer feedback, I’ve added a few enhancements. Three that might be of interest are :

• Embed Points : I have adding in the ability to insert custom code embed in various parts of the template. What does this mean? Well - quite simply customers are now able to insert custom PHP, Javascript, or HTML code into each theme page by using one or more of the many available embed points. What this means is that they can define custom code to be inserted in an embed point, and then they can try out different layout options without their custom code being overwritten by the specific PHP code required for each layout selected.
• New Theme - 2RH sidebars : This theme has been requested for quite some time - but I struggled to get IE6 to behave while still allowing the use of the source-ordered template that I use as the base template for the various layout options provided for in RapidFormatter. After multiple tries I eventually managed to find a web page the provided the one snippet of information that I needed to banish the irritating IE6 problem. So - now my customers can select either a fixed-width, or variable-width 2RH sidebar option as one of the 8 layout permutations offered within RapidFormatter.
• Google Search Widget: As part of my focus on increasing the monetization options within the Rapid Niche Websites System, I have added the Google search widget to the list of available widgets that can be included. You can add this both within RapidFormatter when first designing your site, or at a later stage when you decide to refine your site and/or test alternative monetization options.

It’s a huge relief that two big issues have been addressed - the WP2.3 upgrade, and the inclusion of a popular theme format. I am now able to start addressing a number of additional enhancements that I have wanted to include for the past few months.

WP2.3 was released on September 24th.While WP2.2 didn’t cause too many problems with the introduction of Widgets, this release is different.

In order to make WordPress easier to extend in the future, the WordPress team have changed they way they categorise data - in geek speak they refer to it as the taxonomy schema.

In practical terms this means that the Categories table no longer exists. So any plugins or themes that directly refer to the Categories or Post2Cat tables will break.

Not sure if your site is at risk if you decide to upgrade your site?

I found a useful plugin that you use basically on a once-off basis. You upload it to your site, activate it, and read the report that it generates:

This report can help you locate the plugins that you need to upgrade, and it also analyses your theme to to see if there is any embedded code that could cause problems.

To get this plugin, go to Wordpress Upgrade Preflight Check

Running it before you upgrade could save you a lot of headaches - as you will know which plugins to deactivate or even whether you should delay the upgrade for a few weeks to give the various plugin developers time to implement the necessary code upgrades.

One of the features of RapidFormatter is the ability to change a sites colors by selecting one of a number of color options. By selecting a color option, you can have up to 40 CSS settings set automatically. But choosing how all these color shades tie together can be a pain.

Click to enlarge…

Till recently I wrestled with Color Schemer Studio. It is a workable product, but its downfall is the preview window - a small window that gives you a crude idea of the color scheme :

Now contrast this to Color Wheel Pro - a new product I came across last week. In fact I came across it by Googling for an alternative to Color Schemer Studio (a product I bought about a year ago).

What I like about Color Wheel Pro is the sample Flash images that change color based on your color scheme. They provide multiple previews :

What I also like is that the window is scaleable - so you can resize your window to a decent size , and get a good idea of how the color scheme will look on a representative image.

Now the good news for us is that this is a new product. To help promote this product, you can get this for free you are willing to put a link on your site. You don’t have to publish an article like this. I just like the product, and thought I would share a neat web development tool with my readers.