The Aftermath

Category : programming + software

Right after I upgraded WordPress to the latest minor version over a month ago, I soon realized that I miscalculated how minor that upgrade actually was.

If you’re familiar with the “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” rule, along with its lesser known clause: “But if you’re going to anyway, try it somewhere else first” I suggest following that rule. But not following either of these rules means you’re going to end up with some problems. Now, I don’t recall 100% what I was thinking at the time but I decided to ignore everything and proceeded with “fixing” it anyway. At first, everything looked good until I decided to run a quick check and noticed a few problems.

Upon initially checking out the site, I realized that my templates were somewhat outdated when I remembered that I had inserted a few hacks to pull data directly from the database instead of using a standard method. This version of WP seems to have changed enough since then and rendered this hack invalid, but things were still working without throwing too many errors so no problem. Then I dug a little deeper and noticed some other flaws and decided it’s time to perform fix number two.

This is when I learned that I had shot myself in the foot twice. The first bullet was blindly fired when I decided to perform an upgrade without testing it on my local machines first. And the second was fired when I realized I had some problems creeping up in all of my templates. I then decided to dig up my old templates to find some bandages. I then quickly emptied the gun in the other foot when I realized my sources were a total mess and I didn’t comment much of anything.

I could have easily spent this entire time repairing and commenting the current templates, but I’m slightly tired of the current theme and want to try something new. And since I’m now out of bullets, I’ve spent most of my free time using the gun to repeatedly knock myself unconscious between rebuilding all my templates and CSS from scratch.

In retrospect it’s not so bad since this forced me into a needed (yet unscheduled) update cycle.

And maybe when I’m done, I could revisit and salvage the current template and make it available for download.

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