Adventures In Upgrading: Template Sets

Subtitle this post "Undo". Those of you who came by these parts over the weekend saw a fresh new look for salguod.net. Today, we're back to the old.

I like that template set and will likely return to it, but not only did it break my favorite anti-spam plugin, and with it, commenting, but it reset my archive mapping. What does that mean? That means every page on my site, every entry and every archive (monthly, category, etc) was published to a new location. That meant that every page had a new URL.

Oops.

I don't get a lot of traffic nor do I suspect there are a lot of links out there to my site, but I certainly don't want to break the ones that are. I had not expected that to happen, but looking at the way archive mappings are tied to the archive templates, I guess it should have been expected. One of the things that I looked forward to in MT4.21 was template sets that allow you to change the look and layout of you blog in one simple step. I think that's problematic if in changing that template set also can potentially change every URL in your site.

I actually plan on changing my page URLs. My site is built with the old style links using the entry ID, the new standard (as used by that template set) uses what's called the entry basename adn produces a more human readable URL. That takes some planning to make sure that Google and other outside links know how to find the new URL from the old.

So, I had the old database backup from Friday (I use dbsender to get DB backups emailed to me daily) loaded and it's like the weekend never happened. I'll try it again later.

I think the DB restore went fine. I also had to delete the new files that the theme create, so it's possible that I deleted something I needed. Let me know if you find something broken.