I am so glad that wp 2.5.1 has the ability to automatically upgrade plugins because it saves a lot of time and is very neat and tidy. Unfortunately, some of the bigger plugins like cforms or wp-shopping cart tend to mess up if auto-upgraded.
By bigger and big I mean complicated, multi folder/directory plugins with lots of data and whathaveyou.
With the WP-Shopping cart the auto upgrade ended up costing me a day’s labor.
I lost all my product page thumbnail images. How? I don’t know since the uploaded images for products aren’t in the Plugin folder but in the Uploads folder. Therefore they couldn’t have gotten over written. But the linkage to them was messed up.
Although, given the history of wonkiness this plugin has had this might have happened anyway even if I had uploaded the latest version manually…
Mainly, the largest problem for the auto upgrader is this plugin comes in an extra folder “wp-ecommerce”. The folder you want uploaded is “wp-shopping-cart”. WP’s plugin auto upgrader can’t read the readme.txt which of course says do not upload the wp-ecommerce folder, just the wp-shopping-cart folder. So after an auto upgrade the E-Commerce tab in your admin dashboard is there but your products and the shopping cart,widgets and all are not on your site. Your purchase log is gone and there are permalinks leading places that seem not to exist.Before you freak out and lose your cool, don’t get too scared: everything is still in your database.But you will probably have to redo all your product images.The latest version is so much better so don’t let this stop you from upgrading.
Things new to the latest version are:
A Latest Products widget which shows product thumbnails in your sidebar and is invaluable.
Permalinks!
I never thought they’d give us permalinks, did you? Now the plugin is miles closer to SEO. If only there weren’t a tables layout and a load of < br > s that aren’t closed…
The ability to edit the Category link which shows in the sidebar to whatever you want it to say.The Categories list is no longer called Categories but “Product Groups” and so the widget is no longer called “Products and Brands” but Product Groups. This is one of the better improvements. I can well put up with a days work to have a better functioning free shopping cart,can’t you?
Fixing product images:
You may not have this problem but I did: Product thumbnails not getting displayed in the product pages or in the Latest Product widget.
I found that uploading a seperate thumbnail when editing a product solved the issue of the missing pic in the products page but I had to view the source of the sidebar widget to see why my thumbs weren’t being displayed there. It was just a matter of uploading a new thumb via FTP to the uploads/wpsc/thumbnail folder with the same name as was described in the link in the source…
I haven’t got a clue as to why the newest version of this amazing plugin does this with product images. The good news is that it is fixable.
With cforms from deliciousdays I lost my forms because the upgrade didn’t actually upgrade. I’m not sure what it did but the results were I had to do it myself and then redo my forms. Now I am wiser and have backed up my forms. Most likely what happened was some kind of time out during the FTP process that caused things to go awry.
Any time one upgrades one should take care to save a copy of the old version if they have made any code edits. Oftentimes it’s hard to keep track especially if you run a lot of plugins.The auto upgrade function can’t save your carefully thought out edits. But then, if you are the kind of WordPress user that makes carefully thought out code edits you don’t need me to tell you this as you are very clever and need no hand-holding and are probably writing a plugin as I write this..