How to answer: I upgraded to 2.1 and my plugins don’t work…

I’m in the process of gathering a list of things to check in your plugins directory to see if your site will survive the 2.1 upgrade without blowing up. I might turn this into a “Ready to Upgrade Plugin” I’m sure it won’t ever be able to catch everything, but it just might make things go more smoothly for some. With 2.1 possibily coming out on Jan. 22, I don’t know how complete this will be, but it might be worth a shot…

The replacement of the Table* variables is a good place to start. Here’s an email I sent two days ago on the subject. A person had written for help to the hacker list. He had just upraded from WordPress 2.0.5 to 2.1 and suddenly was getting an error in an sql statement.

The SQL statement looked something like this: “select blah, blah, blah from , where”

After a from statement, there is normally a table name. In this case the comma indicated there were two table names. He wanted to know if this could have been caused by the upgrade.

Here is how I responded:

Yes, there were separate variables that held the table names. They were depreciated in version 1.5 and the developers tried to get the word out for this. In the comments, the 1.5 code said that the variables would be around for a few more months:

[php]
// We’re going to need to keep this around for a few months
// even though we’re not using it internally

$tableposts = $wpdb->posts;
$tableusers = $wpdb->users;
$tablecategories = $wpdb->categories;
$tablepost2cat = $wpdb->post2cat;
$tablecomments = $wpdb->comments;
$tablelinks = $wpdb->links;
$tablelinkcategories = $wpdb->linkcategories;
$tableoptions = $wpdb->options;
$tablepostmeta = $wpdb->postmeta;
[/php]

As you can see the preferred way to access this information is through the $wpdb->tablename method that was added to the (then) version 1.3 source code in the summer of 2004.

As it is now 2007, the 2.1 release is FINALLY removing these variables as the comments indicated would be done two years ago.

Please contact the author of those plugins and send them to this link: http://wordpress.org/development/2006/12/naughty-or-nice/

That will help get them back on trac with the WordPress code.

And btw, the pun in the last line was intended, but no on seemed to catch it!

[edit]
Hilarious – Because I put “Summer of 2004” and “release” in the post, adsense thinks I’m writing all about movies and is recommending DVDs when you view only this post…
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