Sorry to any readers who may have been inconvenienced yesterday. I upgraded from version 2.1 of Wordpress to 2.6. This upgrade was not quite as easy as my last upgrade, almost all attributable to the fact that I skipped over a few different iterations. The takeaway lesson is to upgrade more frequently. I was inspired to make this upgrade in order to use the WordPress app on my iPhone. While I don’t want to get to technical as it interest nobody but myself, I was surprised how the information available to solve the problem was less than stellar regarding what seemed like a common problem.

My Wordpress Categories Dissapearred!
Somewhere between WordPress 2.1 and WordPress 2.6, Wordpress got rid of the wp_categories table and replaced it with wp_terms, and wp_terms_taxonomy. Plunging directly into the belly of the beast (i.e. myPhpAdmin), I found that while my ids were there and correct, all the names and descriptions were gone. As a result I had to “manually” update all the rows with the right information. When I did a google of the problem, I found what I needed to know. But with all apologies to David Cumps, his solution of manually editing each category didn’t fly with me. I have too many categories, and I am fundamentally a lazy person. However, I credit his solution to pointing me to the root of problem and what I needed to do. I did have the backup logs for my database, and by using them and some excel string parsing I was able to create update statements for wp_terms and wp_term_taxononomy that hopefully has fixed the problem. Now, if I can only get my category cloud back…