A Short Story of Upgrading to WordPress 2.8

Prelude

Way back in the olden days of WordPress, version 2.5x I think it was, if you wanted to respond to a comment from one of your readers, you would have to actually go to the post itself in order to have a conversation with the reader.

Each and every comment, spread over numerous posts had to be responded to in the same manner. Go to the post & type your comment. Go to the next post & comment. Ad Infinitum until you answered each comment from every commentor.

Then came along Better Comments Manager a plugin by Keith Dsouza. I could actually answer every comment from Within the Administration page of WordPress. They could be threaded, individual or multiple responses to the individuals of the community. Convient for me since I could do it all in the background and not have to access each post to have a conversation.

Lo and Behold, WordPress in versions 2.7x got the idea and ran with it, making it a part of the internal commenting system.

I naturally deactivated Keith’s plugin since I thought it wouldn’t be needed any longer. Then I delected it.

Interlude

All was well until the fateful day of the Upgrade to WordPress 2.8.

Most everything worked, even the Theme still looked good and all the Widgets worked just fine. Only one catch.

I couldn’t respond to comments in the Administration Page as I could before in v 2.7x. I asked people in the know, people who have dealt with this type of situation and I asked for advice. None of them were having problems with their “Reply” to comments in the Admin page. It seemed I was the only one.

The thing seems to be that I am running a Parent/Child theme. A Framework theme that others build upon in order to customize a theme to change the look and feel of a Blog.

Well, needless to say, I am not going to change my theme at this point just for the convience of being able to answer what few comments I get from the Admin Page. That’s when I remembered Keith’s Better Comments Manager plugin and started looking high and low for it.

End

I finally found it in some old zip file I had used way back when to install it in the first place. So, if you are having problems with your theme interface with comments through the Administration Page of WordPress 2.8, you may want to try the Better Comments Manager plugin by Keith Dsouza. It works for me.

Moral

If something works, don’t try to fix it unless something goes wrong. Then be sure to have access to older versions of what Did Work, just in case the fix is broken  too.