This site was in maintenance mode for a good part of the evening due to an incompatibility with WP 2.3.1 and the previous theme used here on Techblog. I spent some time trying to work out the problems but the breakage was pretty severe so i figured it was time to either design something new from scratch, or just grab one of the many readily available WP themes and use that for a while. I decided to go for the latter choice.. i might still spend some time adding more customizations, but for now i needed something that worked well and looked clean.

Anyway, after trying out a bunch of themes from the WP Theme Viewer and playing around with the WP Theme Generator, i was able to narrow my choices down to about 5 themes and finally went with the blog.txt theme by Scott.

I’ve already made some SEO related modifications to the header.php template file. Also, i had to upgrade my tags structure – twice! Once from some really old wordpress tagging plugin that kept your tags in a key called: ttaglist, in the postmeta table. I had to use the UTW plugin to import these old tags. Then came the second upgrade. I used the new built-in tag import feature in WP 2.3.1 to convert my newly created UTW tags into the native WP tagging structure. Everything seemed to go smoothly, and i was able to get rid of all my old tagging plugins and install Simple Tags for advance tag management. I had to get rid of a few other really old plugins, but the site runs much faster now, and i’m sure it won’t take me too long to find a ton of new plugins to clutter up my site in no time!

So far, i have to say, i’m pretty happy with the upgrades. I haven’t tested everything too thoroughly yet, so more changes might still be on the horizon.. including another complete theme change. Just giving you all heads up!