Upgrading to WordPress 2.6 Broke My Categories
July 21st, 2008 | by GTD Wannabe |Usually, I try to avoid upgrading complicated things until all the bugs are worked out. That’s why I’ve just not upgraded my WordPress installation, even though a new version has been out for a while. Silly me, I waited a little too long, so instead of upgrading to 2.5, I ended up upgrading to 2.6. I figured - great, additional functionality. Dummy.
Although I carefully (I thought) followed the upgrade instructions, I still ended up with grief. Everything seemed to be going so well until I noticed that all of my categories were blank. No names, no descriptions, just counts. WTF?
It turns out that this is a common problem with the 2.6 upgrade. I don’t know why. Personally, I don’t care. I’ve just lost 2 hours of my life fixing my categories. Two hours I will never get back. And even though I thought I had backed up my WordPress (i.e., I copied everything from the server onto my computer), I seemed to be missing the critical piece, i.e., the table that contains the category names/descriptions/counts. Argh.
I managed to rebuild the information from scratch. Scratch meaning that I looked at a Google cache of my blog, which showed me all the categories that I had, along with counts when I did a mouse-over, e.g.,
Unfortunately, I have many categories with 1, 2, 3, 4 tags, etc. So, there were only a few I could match up right away. Then it became one big logic problem. I finally got it solved, and then followed the excellent instructions here on how to fix the category problem.
Don’t ask me what I did – the instructions were so good I just numbly followed along, like a little monkey typing on my keyboard. And now, I think things are back to “normal”.
However, now I’m curious to see what the difference between categories and tags is. Hmmmm…
2 Responses to “Upgrading to WordPress 2.6 Broke My Categories”
By DanGTD on Jul 22, 2008 | Reply
Tags can help you with search engines, they are well-known words that describe a certain article.
Categories can have weird names sometimes.
Also, you can add how many tags you want to a post, but it will not fit under more than 2-4 categories, normally.
By Mike Brown on Jul 22, 2008 | Reply
Glad to see you’re back at the blog and survived the WP upgrade.
I’m old skool, but I view Categories as the Table of Contents: high-level subject headings. I view Tags as the index entries: nouns and verbs, multiple entry-points into the material.
On my blog, I often have posts that round up various links I collect. So I assign a Category of “Link Harvest” so they’re all grouped together, but each post may have multiple tags to delineate the various subjects described in that post.
Honestly, I don’t do tags consistently and my categories are a mess. So I should probably rationalize them someday/maybe.