Not everything is as smooth as butter

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I had a couple of freak out moments with the use of WordPress. I haven’t been able to discover what caused one of them and I’m a bit annoyed at the other (even though bugs happen and you have to deal.)

The first one was related to the database: all of a sudden, I ceased to be able to authenticate with phpMyAdmin, which I needed for making a backup. You see, when I started out, I grabbed just any old database for what I thought was going to be just a learning dry run. It turned out that I got too excited and developed the whole site using this old database. What happened next is that I had to move all that data to a production database. In all honesty, I don’t know who to blame for the problem: WordPress, phpMyAdmin, or yet some server set up. The fact is that I could authenticate successfully using mysql from the command line, but not through phpMyAdmin. I gave up on this for a while and move on with things only to discover two days later that things were working normally again. Hmmm…

The other issue had to do with permalinks. I changed the setting in the WordPress menu so that the site would use permalinks with full dates (including numerical day of the months). I use the awesome Atahualpa theme version 3.4.3, which I think was majorly unhappy with my spanking new WordPress 3.0.1. What happened next was befuddlement, as my entire site stopped loading giving me 403/404 errors. I went around checking folder permissions, poking around the web for help in discussion forums (ok, I know the correct plural is ‘fora’, don’t be a snob), but no dice. Gave up on everything after one hour of feeling stupid and watched a movie (Almodovar’s Broken Embraces, which I didn’t think was his best). Came back and opened the browser only to find the site up again! (Well, I guess it’s time to update my Atahualpa theme to a version that overcomes these incompatibilities with WP 3.0.1.)

Although I was happy to be in business again, I had to tweak a few things in my site. When the new permalink syntax took effect, I ended up with URL name clashes, which WordPress kindly ‘solved’ by appending integers to the conflicting file names (actually, directories in my site.)

And, I have yet to complete my swap of databases for this site, but I expect there will be data *in there* to update, so I’m getting instructed on the dangers before taking the leap.

3 thoughts on “Not everything is as smooth as butter

  1. Heya, Someone mentioned this site over at http://www.trancecommunity.com/ a while ago. Anyway, I’m not necessarily into this stuff but Not everything is as smooth as butter Luiz Felipe Perrone just happened to grab my attention while I was browsing through so i thought id check it out. Great blog you have here

  2. Interestingly enough, the title of this post seems to have attracted some misguided attention. I just got to moderate (as in “trash”) the first inappropriate comment, hooray!

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