Sometimes I think that if I had to choose between upgrading WordPress or contracting colorectal cancer I’d be taking a good, hard look at polyp styles and options. In a nutshell, WordPress 2.3 hosed my development site (and thank God I chose to do the Right Thing and avoided the temptation to throw it straight into production, or I’d be having conniptions right about now- or perhaps I should say my current conniptions would be far less intense).

Immediately after uploading the new WP files I was treated to the following delightful error at the top of every page (which also generated a 404):

WordPress database error: [Table 'megatonikwp1.wp_terms' doesn't exist]
SELECT t.*, tt.*, tr.object_id FROM wp_terms AS t INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy AS tt ON tt.term_id = t.term_id INNER JOIN wp_term_relationships AS tr ON tr.term_taxonomy_id = tt.term_taxonomy_id WHERE tt.taxonomy IN (’category’, ‘post_tag’) AND tr.object_id IN (313, 312, 309, 306, 303, 301, 299, 298, 296, 295, 294, 293, 291, 284, 283) ORDER BY t.name ASC

Joy.

This thread in the WP support forums suggested an incompatible plugin or theme was to blame. The dev site didn’t use any third-party plugins (or so I thought), so that meant my beautiful theme was the culprit. Unfortunately, I could no longer log in to WordPress, so I decided to hose everything off the dev site and throw a vanilla 2.3 installation at it.

This eliminated the database errors, but no CSS was applied to the site, even on the admin side, and even though WP is supposed to default to its… well, its default theme. Uploading and activating my current custom theme worked, after a fashion, but none of the images called in the CSS loaded, and the admin pages were still hosed.

Eventually I wiped the dev site clean and restored it from a backup, then tried again, this time in a bit less slapdash manner, carefully going through plugins and deactivating what few there were. I found that Auttomatic’s Sidebar Widgets plugin was the culprit, being completely incompatible with WordPress 2.3 (it’s no longer a plugin, but was rolled wholesale into WP when 2.2 was released, apparently).

So beware! If you’ve used the Sidebar Widgets plugin that brought you widgetized joy back in the days of WP 2.0, it turns into pure evil under 2.3, bringing tears and suffering to your site.