WordPress update & plugin troubles…

Just great! Recently I updated my blog to wordpress 2.3.3 (because of a major security leak) and all of a sudden almost my entire blog crashed .
Without any proper warning on the wordpress site when downloading the new blog version, I assumed there should be no problem to update, but that turned out to be a big mistake…
my entire blog crashed!

It turned out the (old) plugins were the root of the problem and I had to delete them all in order to get my blog up and running again.

Mad as I could be I tried to reinstall new versions of plugins, but since most of the plugins were not yet updated and compatible with the new WordPress version it was still drama and I decided to let it be and leave my blog a big mess (no syntax highlighting, broken tags, etc.).

After a week of snowboard fun I regained the courage to look for new plugins to replace the old ones. And whaddayaknow; I found just the right plugins for my blog. I’m not sure if it was the time plugin-developers needed to update their plugins or the time I needed to cooldown and start a fresh new search but I did it .

SWF and Youtube embedding
To show swf files, youtube videos and other mash-up stuff I now use xhtml-video-embed. This plugin lets you embed different content using a simple [tag] ... [/tag]-markup…
No more fucked-up embedcode in your post editor!

Syntax highlighting
To display my codesnipets in proper format without screwing up the layout of my theme I now use WP-Codebox. It turned out this plugin is even better than my old syntaxhighlighter-plugin!
This plugin uses a <pre lang="LANGUAGE"> ... <pre>-markup and supports a lot of languages (including actionscript). Very nice.

Tagging
For the tags of my post I now use the new tag-feature of WordPress. Since it doesn’t display tags with posts by default I had to find a way to show them anyway and I found the answer right here: http://richgilchrest.com/how-to-add-wordpress-23-tags-to-your-current-theme/
In short; you just have to add a line like the one below into the index.php, archive.php,  and/or single.php file of your theme:
<?php the_tags("<b>Tags:</b> ", ", ", ""); ?>
How easy…

In the end it turned out to be all worth the stress and nail nibbling… justGREAT!

PS: With my blog back in business I decided to change the header and footer of my theme as well. Hope you appreciate it