Seamless WassUp Upgrading

admin — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 14:52:23 +0000

Precautionary Steps for a Seamless WassUp Upgrade

In the newest WassUp WordPress plugin update (v.1.8.1), there is a precautionary notice about upgrading. This notice says that you should not upgrade if your site is busy. That is, you should check the number of current visitors online before upgrading and, if there are more than one regular visitors or multiple spiders online, don’t upgrade!!

WassUp is different from most plugins because once it is enabled it starts working and never stops until it is disabled, deactivated or your site goes down. Every visitor click, every spider hit, every search, and every feed request triggers WassUp to write data into it’s tables. The more popular your site is, the more data WassUp has to write in order to track visitors browsing your site.

An upgrade during a busy time for your site increases the odds that WassUp will be interrupted in the middle of a write operation. That kind of interruption can cause file corruption or can leave a permanent lock on WassUp tables. If that were to happen, WassUp would stop all new recordings until the lock is cleared or until ‘wp_wassup’ table is repaired. Note that this only affects WassUp, not WordPress itself, so your site would remain functioning.

If your site is always busy or you just can’t wait to upgrade, I recommend that you temporarily “disable recording” in WassUp >> Wassup-Options, [Statistics Recording] Tab, or put your site into “maintenance mode” prior to doing the upgrade. If you do this, always remember that you will have to manually re-enable recording or undo maintenance mode page when you have done upgrading.

For a seamless upgrade every time, always check the plugin’s “Installation” instructions at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wassup/installation/ for any new installation/upgrade procedures that could affect your copy of WassUp.

A Simple Fix for “Simple Tags”

admin — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 14:54:12 +0000

I am not an official WordPress tester, but to keep up with the latest changes and to make sure my own plugins are always compatible with upcoming versions of WordPress, I run WordPress development version on this site.

There are several plugins installed on this site that end up also getting tested for compatibility with upcoming versions of WordPress, although that is not my intention. Wassup, cFormsII, Bad Behavior, and Akismet all run successfully on WordPress 2.7 development version . One plugin that failed was Simple Tags version 1.5.7 by Amaury Balmer. This plugin produced an error because of a test in the code that rejects unrecognized versions of WordPress.

Fortunately the fix was simple. It only required that the version test be replaced by one that tests for current or higher version of WordPress. I modified the code myself and now “Simple Tags 1.5.7a” runs on 2.7-dev.

If you would like to apply this patch to your own copy of Simple Tags 1.5.7, you can download it To install, just uncompress the file “simple-tags.php”, upload it to your web server, and overwrite the file of the same name in the “simple-tags” folder in your WordPress plugins directory. Be sure to deactivate “Simple Tags 1.5.7″ beforehand and reactivate it as “Simple Tags 1.5.7a” afterwards.

12/16/2008 Update: Simple Tags 1.5.8 was released and is compatible with WordPress 2.7. However, the flawed code still exists and will continue to cause Simple Tags to become disabled with future releases and development versions of WordPress. If you would like to “future-proof” your version of Simple Tags 1.5.8, download the file, simple-tags-fix.zip, unzip it, and replace “simple-tags.php” in your plugins directory.

06/17/2009 Update: simple-tags-fix.zip is now updated for Simple Tags 1.6.6

09/15/2010 Update: This fix has been obsoleted since version 1.7 of Simple Tags and is no longer available here.

IT Blog » Plugins

Seamless WassUp Upgrading

Precautionary Steps for a Seamless WassUp Upgrade

A Simple Fix for “Simple Tags”