I recently upgraded my blogs to WordPress 2.8.1. It took me a week to realize that was a mistake in one area.
While the vast majority of customization I’ve done in WP has been to templates, there have been some exceptions. A very large one was with WIST, my quotations database.
WIST is an oddball because of how I use the data. Since I’m tracking quotations, I end up using some of the standard blog fields in an odd fashion: the post title is the citation for the quote, the category is the author, the extended “more” text area is used for additional details on the quote (sourcing, links to full text, etc.).
For the blog itself, that means I need to change around where different fields are displayed and formatted. That’s fine — non-trivial, but easily maintainable — because it’s template-based. As long as the template I use (iNove) doesn’t get broken by some future WP release, I’m golden.
RSS feeds, though, are a different matter. There are a number of folks who follow WIST along by feed, or by (through FeedBurner) email. Those aren’t handled by the theme templates; they are handled by actual WP files. And they’re a bit more complicated than normal PHP/HTML templates (Atom, especially).
And, of course, they get replaced when you upgrade WP.
I struggled quite a bit when I converted WIST to WP in getting the feeds done. But I was very careful to keep the original, unmodified versions, in case something went wrong. I was less careful, though, to keep copies of the modified versions once I had them working.
So after the 2.8 and 2.8.1 update got put in, WIST trundled along for about a week with feeds and email updates that showed quotes and sources, but no authors. Yikes!
(I wish there was a place in the WP control panel where you could put notes, along the lines of, “Hey, don’t forget you modified these modules so that they don’t get overwritten when you update the system.” Yeah, that would be useful. Something similar for)
It took me a few hours yesterday to recreate what I’d done, make sure it was fully commented, and make sure I have the modified versions on my hard drive so that they don’t get zorched in the future. Good change management is time consuming up front, but a serious time and quality saver downstream.
The only silver lining here is that they’re actually done up better than when I did the original WP conversion, since they aren’t the last thing I had to get done after a long effort.
Lesson learned. This time.