dougv.com | The Web home of Doug Vanderweide

This blog probably appears different because it is different. How so?

It’s been upgraded to WordPress 2.3. Although it’s taken a minor revision number, WordPress 2.3 is nearly a new release with lots of new features, including:

• Native (built-in) tagging, which is long overdue
• Automatic program update notices through the Dashboard
• Significant and extensive URL improvements, including a system that will prevent old permalinks from going bad if you later change how your permalinks are structured
• A moderation system for multiple-user blogs
• Improved performance of the TinyMCE rich text editor

Special note to those of you considering the upgrade: This one requires a fairly significant database upgrade (due mostly to the new tagging feature), and will render visible error messages in your blog if you don’t run the DB upgrade script. Be forewarned.

The theme has been updated. Pretty much since August, this blog was skinned in TypoXP 1.0.3. And while TypoXP 1.0.3 worked just fine with WordPress 2.3, I decided, what the heck — I’m making a big leap, might as well update the theme, too.

So you’re now seeing the TypoXP 2.0.1`theme, which looks and acts slightly different from the previous version.

I’ve changed syntax highlighting plug-ins. Previously, I had been using iG:Syntax Hiliter, which I liked quite a bit and had hacked up some to look the way I wanted it to look.

While iG:Syntax Hiliter version 3.5 works with this WordPress release, that plug-in has been out of development for over a year and a half. It’s just a matter of time until it doesn’t work any more. Since I was acting now on a number of upgrades, it made sense to act now on this item, too.

I chose as replacement the outstanding WP-Syntax plug-in, which uses a newer version of GeSHi and a smarter way of adding code tags. Unlike iG:Syntax Hiliter, which uses BBCode-style tags to render code blocks (e.g., [php][/php]), WP-Syntax uses a simple PRE tag with a couple of attributes (which are removed by the plug-in, to ensure your code is clean), like so:

.

That required me to go through the wp_posts table and change all the BBCode-style tags in the post_content field to PRE tags. I did that with a series of simple two-line MySQL UPDATE queries that made use of the REPLACE function:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '[php]', '< pre lang="php">');
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '[/php]', '</ pre>');

You’ll want to remove the spaces between the opening angle brackets and “pre”; I had to add them to prevent overloading the markup plug-in.

I simply ran those queries — modified for each of the languages supported by GeSHi — through the SQL tab of phpMyAdmin, and within about 10 minutes, it was as though I had been using WP-Syntax all along.

I’m very pleased with the results and I hope you are, too. Although if you aren’t, there’s not much I can do — we’re pretty much past the point of no return.