SFU Blogs

The upgrade to WordPress 2.9.1 is complete. No issues were reported during the test phase, but please check your blogs.sfu.ca site and report any problems to blogs@sfu.ca.

IT Services is preparing to upgrade the SFU Blogs service from WordPress version 2.8.4 to the latest release, version 2.9.1. To help facilitate a smooth upgrade, we have created a test environment so that you may check your sites and ensure they continue to work.

The test environment is a clone of the current blogs.sfu.ca server, as of this morning (Wednesday, February 3), upgraded to WordPress 2.9.1. The test environment is completely separate from the production blogs.sfu.ca; changes made to the test environment will not affect your normal site.

The URL for test environment is http://blogdev.its.sfu.ca. If your current site was, for example, http://blogs.sfu.ca/clubs/basketweaving, the test address is http://blogdev.its.sfu.ca/clubs/basketweaving.

Please take a few moments and check your test site — do the things you would normally do on your regular site (create posts, pages, etc.). Please let us know (at blogs@sfu.ca) as soon as possible if you encounter anything amiss. For those who have third-party plugins installed, please note: upgrades can often cause issues with plugins. IT Services doe not provide support for third-party WordPress plugins. If you encounter plugin-related issues with in the test environment please let us know so that we can disable the plugins before upgrading your production site.

There is one important bug-fix being included in this update: right now, if an editor attempts to edit the Settings > General page (e.g. change the blog title or tagline), the site will be rendered inaccessible. We’ve fixed this bug in this release. Please try to change the title or tagline in Settings > General in your test site (AND ONLY THE TEST SITE) and let us know if there are any issues.

We would like to perform the upgrade a week from now (Wednesday, February 10th). Please test out your site on blogdev.its.sfu.ca and report any issues you may find before next Wednesday.

Some major changes were made to SFU Blogs this weekend. These changes have been planned for quite some time but were accelerated due to a critical security vulnerability in earlier versions of WordPress.

• Upgrade to WordPress 2.8.4
• More capabilities for Editors
• Better user management

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WordPress 2.6.2 was released on September 8, 2008. 2.6.2 is a security and bugfix release. See the linked post for full release notes.

All SFU blogs have been upgraded to 2.6.2.; no problems have been noted.

All blogs hosted under blogs.sfu.ca were upgraded to WordPress version 2.6 on July 22. No problems were noted.

Read more about WordPress 2.6 here.