WordPress upgrade blues

Nov 18, 2006

Although WordPress is my favorite blogging tool (actually I’m too lazy to learn another and too cheap to purchase some professional blogging software) it can sometimes drive you up the wall.

Ever since I upgraded from WP 1.5 to WP 2 I’ve been having trouble with trackbacks and pingbacks. A few months ago I gave up searching for a workaround and got on to some other pressing affairs of my life. Then today, I don’t remember now why, I was again looking for this particular workaround when I noticed a newer version of WP is available. Downloaded it. Upgraded my installation. Immediately my Live Writer started showing some xmlrpc.php related error.

Something led to another and after an hour-long struggle I was there with the old installation totally deleted (after taking the backup, of course) and a new installation showing WP’s welcome post. After restoring the blog posts from the backup I discovered to my shock that no permalinks were working. I knew there could be some problem with my .htaccess file, so I uploaded it from the backup folder. Still, I kept getting the ominous 404 error. Some further study revealed that my .htaccess file didn’t have the proper permission. Well, that solved the problem.

Now the xmlrpc.php: this file has some problem with the pingback system of WordPress and the problem can be solved by using the “no ping wait” plugin. Unfortunately the author lost all his/her data due to some server error. But I have the file in case you need it.