Well, this might be one of the last times I do a huge WordPress MU merge! I’ve just finished merging the code from WordPress 2.9 beta 1 into WordPress MU trunk. No, I didn’t link to the actual merge changeset. That’s 2007 and huge! 
Want to give it a go? Grab the zip file from here and install it on a test server. Do not, under any circumstances install it on your production server! Be aware that I haven’t tested most of the code yet so there may have been errors made during the merge.
We also need to work out a good way of adding the commentmeta table to each blog. If your MU site has more than a few dozen blogs you need to add this table before you upgrade. On WordPress.com, it took quite a long time to add that table to each of the millions of blogs there! It’s probably something that an external plugin should handle. It’ll have to be linked from the MU download page and hopefully talked about enough that nobody tries to upgrade without it. Ideas?
Oh, I’m testing out WordPress 2.9-beta-1 and changed theme here. I’m using a heavily modified version of P2. Love it so far. I’ve managed to hack it to do what I want. Noel did a great job with the theme.
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30 Comments
kgraeme on December 2, 2009 at 9:14 pm.
Woo! That’s exciting!
As for the commentmeta table, I really don’t think you can trust that people will know. No matter how much you talk about it, some people just don’t read everything. And those kinds of messages are typically only seen by people keeping up with their upgrades. Think about the people in the MU forum who are trying to do a straight upgrade install from something like 1.5 to 2.8.6. Think about how much they haven’t been paying attention.
Donncha (1707 comments.) on December 3, 2009 at 9:56 am.
True, I think the “Run the upgrade script” message will have to be more annoying in this release to encourage every site admin to run it. It’s a pretty intensive operation creating tables so I may reduce the chance the automatic upgrader runs. Right now, if your site has more than 50 blogs it divides that number by 50 and runs the upgrader if a random number between 0 and that number is 1. I might halve the chance, or even make it a 1 in “blog count” chance.
Without that comment table the comments moderation page probably won’t work well, and it might stop users leaving comments too of course.
John James Jacoby (6 comments.) on December 3, 2009 at 7:43 pm.
Can’t seem to get the post thumbnail to work. The box and link show up, but link no worky. Haven’t really looked at why yet, but I figured I’d post it here to get the word out, see if anyone else has the problem, or if anyone else has fixed it.
John James Jacoby (6 comments.) on December 3, 2009 at 7:44 pm.
And I replied to the wrong thing, so I’m a total dumbass…
John James Jacoby (6 comments.) on December 3, 2009 at 8:12 pm.
Solved. The problem is if you hide the MU Media Button for add_image, the #id doesn’t exist and the jQuery doesn’t fire. My guess is this is a bug, so I’ll plop this into the trac.
beachbum on December 2, 2009 at 9:15 pm.
i have about 150 sites, if i dont have the new commentmeta table in each one will it crash?
Donncha (1707 comments.) on December 3, 2009 at 9:49 am.
It won’t crash but your server might be stressed as the automatic upgrader tries to upgrade each blog. To reduce the load on your server, the upgrade script doesn’t run every time the dashboad is loaded on your blogs. Once an MU site is bigger than 50 blogs the chance the upgrader script runs in the background reduces (on your site with 150 blogs, there’s a 1 in 3 chance the upgrader will run when one of your users visits their dashboard). You’re encouraged to use the “Upgrade Site” page to upgrade all your blogs.
See this chunk of code for the upgrade code.
beachbum on December 5, 2009 at 4:45 pm.
I’m hosted on shared “nightmarehost” servers and foresee a huge problem if this is resource heavy. would it be possible to just have the script run like once every time the dashboard is visited and i just spend a few hours doing one at a time?
Side question- whats the status of individual site(blog) avatars?
John James Jacoby (6 comments.) on December 2, 2009 at 9:21 pm.
Few bumps in the road but was able to make it go. Had to manually add the commentsmeta table, and remove some duplicate code out of wp-settings.php. shutdown_action_hook was declared twice, and streams.php and gettext.php no longer exist.
Donncha (1707 comments.) on December 2, 2009 at 10:50 pm.
Thanks John, I had fixed the shutdown function on my test server but forgot to merge that change in. I’ve removed those includes too.
Strange that the table wasn’t created automatically, they were when I ran a site upgrade.
John James Jacoby (6 comments.) on December 3, 2009 at 2:42 am.
I have a feeling that I didn’t need to make them myself, but when my upgrade white screened, instead of checking error logs like a good boy I made the table manually thinking it being missing broke something. Ah well… Good way to spend an hour I guess.
caesarsgrunt (2 comments.) on December 2, 2009 at 9:38 pm.
So, uh… you merged beta 1 – the day after beta 2 was released?
Just joking; I know it’s a lot of work to catch up with the main WP.
So, why could it be the last huge code merge? That’s not explained in your post.
Donncha (1707 comments.) on December 3, 2009 at 9:40 am.
Caesar – believe it or not, but merging this amount of code actually takes several days. You have to start somewhere and there’s no point in refreshing the WP svn every time there’s an update.
It’s probably the last big merge because WP and MU will be merged in WordPress 3.0
Denis (1 comments.) on December 3, 2009 at 3:01 pm.
That is a *very* scary though… Even though it would be a most welcome improvement…
I foresee plenty upgrade problems when we do this. Especially on sites that already share users tables among multiple sites.
caesarsgrunt (2 comments.) on December 5, 2009 at 6:17 pm.
Donncha, I do understand about it taking a long time to merge – I don’t envy you having to do it!
I was just joking ’cause of the coincidence of your finishing on the same date as the next beta was released…
I’m happy to hear that WP and MU will be merged in 3.0. I thought this had been cancelled.
Forrest on December 8, 2009 at 11:31 pm.
Any guess on when we’ll see WP 3.0? Q1 ’10? I’ve got a ton of stuff I want to do with WPMU, but am considering waiting until they’re merged as a lot of what I’m doing is fixing stuff that works in WP but not WPMU. Thanks.
Arend (1 comments.) on December 12, 2009 at 8:45 am.
I’m with Forrest, the merge is a huge thing for me. I know it’s hard to give any dates but even a hint would be great.
Donncha (1707 comments.) on December 12, 2009 at 10:10 am.
I don’t know, but I wouldn’t let the merge stop me using the software. MU will likely work the same after the merge as it does now.
Forrest – if you’re fixing bugs why not submit tickets to trac? Save you fixing them each release!
Forrest on December 15, 2009 at 8:10 pm.
Donncha, I’m referring to bugs in plugins. The ones I’m thinking of have been sent to the developers many times but they still don’t implement the changes needed for WPMU. One that I’m thinking of is popular with many themes, and it gets tiring updating it all. The whole reason I’m using WPMU is to make updating easy.
If it were bugs in WPMU I was fixing, you bet I’d be submitting those.
Donncha (1707 comments.) on December 16, 2009 at 9:27 am.
Ouch, sucks that they won’t update their plugins. Perhaps make a blog post publishing all the “WordPress MU ready” versions of plugins that you’ve modified? Of course include a note saying that the original authors had been sent the changes already. I know a lot of users would be grateful for such a post!