Surprising Journey to Upgrading WordPress 2.6

Posted on July 24, 2008
Filed Under WordPress Admin |

I had couple of websites running WordPress 2.5. As soon as the new release WP 2.6 came out, I decided to upgrade. There are many great enhancements in WordPress 2.6 worth the move. The process ran very smoothly. Just follow the Three Step Upgrade Guide and it was done in minutes.

In addition, I also had couple of sites including this site that were still on WordPress 2.2.1. Since they were so behind, I thought I should also upgrade them to 2.6 as well. By reading the Extended Upgrade Guide, I found it was not too hard. Thus I following the steps to make the move. It was very quick. But when viewing the site, I immediately noticed that all categories were missing. That was a big surprise.

When searching this issue, I saw that was a common issue many users encountered. What happened was, when the upgrade script converted data from old table wp_categories to the new table wp_term_taxonomy, it transferred only the ID but left category name and description blank, which made categories could not be displayed and edited.

In this case, a quick solution is to go directly to wp_term_taxonomy table and fill up the category names that match the ID as seen in the old table. After that, all categories were back to normal and function correctly.

Although an issue like this is not expected considering WP guys usually do great job to avoid obvious bugs like this one, the WP team have acted quickly to deal with this issue.  As seen in the WP Trac, a code fix had been provided. following this instruction, I added the following 4 lines to /wp-admin/includes/upgrade.php:

$name = $category->cat_name;
$description = $category->category_description;
$slug = $category->category_nicename;
$parent = $category->category_parent;

Then I did upgrade for this site. Everything is working greatly. The category is showing. After all, WordPress is EASY.

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