Disaster after upgrade

Hi thiakick,

I’m sorry to hear that you lost your custom templates on upgrade. That’s certainly frustrating. It’s happened to me in the past with other plugins as well.

However, the plugin already supports a method for allowing “upgrade safe” custom templates (it has since the very first version). FPW’s documentation clearly states that you need to make a folder in you current theme’s directory called flexible-posts-widget and add any custom templates there, not in the plugin’s views folder.

There will always be the potential that future plugin updates will overwrite the templates within the plugin views folder. This is a fairly standard method for allowing custom view templates and many plugins work this way.

Sorry again for the frustration,

DaveE

I’m not sure he’s talking about templates. I’m afraid to upgrade because last time I did I lost all my widget settings on for this pluign. Is there a way to backup the actual widget settings made for this? This is a very complex plugin and putting everything back together if it’s lost on upgrade is time I just don’t have.

Hi Jason,

In thaikick’s original post, he specifically states that the custom templates he coded from scratch (but didn’t move from the plugin’s folder into his theme folder) were lost, so I doubt he was referring to the settings which get stored in the database.

In your case, unfortunately I don’t have an upgrade process in place when moving between MAJOR versions of the plugin. If you’re already running version 3.0 or above, then going to 3.0.2 won’t cause any issues.

And, even when moving between version 1.x.x or version 2.x.x and version 3.x.x not all settings will be lost. It really depends on what you’ve configured for each widget. I use the plugin on about a half dozen live sites, some of them with multiple instances of the widget. Even with the ~12+ widgets out there, it didn’t take me long to reset the post types & tax/terms selected for each widget. These are the only settings that should cause issues. Any titles, ordering, counts, thumbnails & custom template settings should remain intact.

I’m sorry there isn’t an easier/better way. Hopefully the plugin has matured enough where I will no longer need to make code changes that will cause upgrade issues at all. That’s one of the goals from v3.

Sorry for the trouble,

Ok, thanks for the follow up. I’ll make the upgrade when I know I’ll have time for troubleshooting in case the settings don’t carry over. I used the plugin very aggressively in conjunction with the Ubermenu. So there were about 20 different widgets with complex settings to configure, so that was the issue last time.