Shari

Did you already edit the sidebar.php file to add those other images in there?

The word “Pages” in your screenshot should be just above the <?php wp_list_pages(); ?> in the sidebar.php. Is it not there?

Can you post the sidebar.php file or give me the URL to it so I can look at it?

Thanks whooami. Delete tables rather than the entire database? (The blog had its own database.)

Awesome, thank you! I was scared to do it, but it worked! Great directions. Thanks again!

This exact same thing happened to one of my sites… I installed WP and then we just left it alone because the owner didn’t have time for it just then… a few weeks later, the blog was gone and the old site was back up, intact, even though it had been deleted.

I suspect the hosting company may have had a failure of some kind and reverted or rolled back to an old backup of the site.

Or, you know, yard gnomes. I like that one better. ??

Whooami, thanks so much for your help. Unfortunately for me, it looks like IPower is basically a sinking ship – my site and three others I maintain with them are all down and were experiencing problems beforehand.

So once I get everything backed up, I’ll find a new host and do a fresh install of the latest WP there. If I can be sure there is no redirect exploit in it like I’ve been reading today, that is!

Thanks again.

That link was the key, Whooami. Thanks. I found my problem down the replies a little bit… a guy on IPower (my host as well) who had the exact same problem that I have, whose site is now no longer at the link he provided. I’m assuming an upgrade isn’t going to help because it’s not WP’s problem, it’s my host’s problem.

So I’m thinking I should just start with a new, up-to-date install of WP on a new host. If I can make a backup of my MySQL database with my WP posts in it, would I be able to put it into the new WordPress install?

Hi Whooami, thanks so much for the reply.

My host is using MySQL 5.0.45, would that cause problems?

If I upgrade my WordPress, will that actually solve the post order problem? Is there anything I should do during the backup process to help make sure the posts are re-ordered properly?

Thanks so much for your help!

Moshu, you can’t be PHP illiterate… haven’t you designed several themes? I’m CSS/HTML literate, but I can only mod themes and only then with limits because I don’t know a lot about the PHP tags that I need to use/modify!

Whooami, thank you! I am ecstatic to report that the upgrades have gone without a hitch. Nothing seems broken except the new theme I had wanted to use, but that’s a compatibility issue with Spam Karma 2.3.

Thanks so much for the advice and for the test comment!

Next weekend’s projects will be upgrading my volunteer sites! Now that I know it’s not such a big bad wolf after all, I’m actually excited about it. ??

I made it! I don’t know if it was too much traffic for one night, but I kept getting socket errors and timing out on my host as I deleted/uploaded files, so it took a while. But it’s done. I really hope someone can drop by and help me test the commenting soon!

Dgold, I was in school as well and just did not have the time. I was also alarmed by how many complaints 2.0 got when it was first released, and I’ll admit to being so happy and comfy with my blog I didn’t want to change anything! Then when things slowed down, all the different upgrades just added to my consternation, but thanks to some great advice from Whooami, I have the version that seems to have impacted the site the least, and I like it that way!

OK, I’ll do that then, before I tweak more things on the site.

What I meant by a text back-up was just to go and put each post’s content into a text file. I wonder if there would be a plug in that could render posts as plain text in the browser window or even as a file. It sounds pretty backwards, but I was thinking in terms of a database backup being corrupted or something… worst-case scenario, what if nothing worked, ever again kind of thing… then the text would at least be saved. But I have over 500 posts, so converting them to text won’t be happening anytime soon!

John, do you have access to a hosted site that you could create a “sandbox” WordPress site on? One of the things that helped me the most was to set up a fresh, empty install in a completely different directory on my server and then just started tweaking a simple theme with three dummy posts.

You need to learn which call functions correspond to which things displayed on the page. It took me several hours a day for a couple of months to really get solid with the different parts of a theme.

Upgrading does not change theme tweaks. The instructions say to leave your wp-content folder on your server if you’ve tweaked it, and only replace those files which are in the new release.

As for the “Hot Topics” question you asked – can you provide a link to the site? It sounds to me like you’re trying to approach this like HTML, which is an easy mistake to make when you just start out…

Oh, booger. I never even saw that.

Upgraded to 2.0.9 and was shocked. It’s all working, it looks like! Not sure about the comments since I can’t seem to comment as a guest, but we’ll see!

Thanks again… if anyone has the time, could you possibly wander over to https://www.thewordens.org/openup and try to leave a comment?

Solved the logout problem by clearing temp files and cookies in my browser’s cache.

And *crossing fingers* commenting seems to have been fixed by upgrading to 2.0.9!