Half a day to upgrade my bloody WP blog from 2.8.4 to 3.1

Famous 5-minute install indeed took probably less than 5 minutes and then a good half a day to find that there seems to be a major frag-up in wp code somewhere, serious enough to be reported on the wp support forums at number 4 in their hit-parade.  The symptom is the homepage of the site and therefore all content cannot be viewed but gets stuck in some sort of redirect loop when running WP 3.1 on IIS 6.0 under Windows Server 2003. This appears as an on-screen hang and a 301 error in the IIS logs against index.php. Spookily it is perfectly possible to log on to the admin back end and muck about with anything; themes, plugins, the works.

The fix is to download a plugin; the “Permalink Fix & Disable Canonical Redirects Pack”

• Upload the ‘permalink-fix-disable-canonical-redirects-pack’ folder to the ‘wp-content/plugins/’ directory.
• Log into the WordPress dashboard http://example.com/wp-admin and activate the plugin.

 This makes the world a happy place for WP again …

Ok, so now I’m at WP 3.1 remind me again why I started this upgrade, oh yes, to get hold of some of the spiffy new 3.0+ only themes. Armed with a shiny new WP dashboard I’m now using the Easel theme, which is a bit crap out of the box as it does not switch on the admin log-in link by default forcing you to type the whole wp-login.php page name. So, next challenge is to find out how I can tart-around with Easel layout.

Oh and how to get rid of the annoying “Warning: fopen(http://www.mjwebb.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron): failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! in D:\DATA\MJWBLOG31\wp-includes\class-http.php on line 1063” error whenever I update a post!