Word Press questions
 

Recently I read a thread that mentioned the Search Engine Management plugin. I thought it sounded good, so I installed and activated it. But I am not sure which of the settings are best. The options are:

Decide here which sites you want to have indexed
home
paged
single
page
Archives by
category
tag
author
date
year
month
day
time


Any input on that?

2nd question...

How much of a pain is it to upgrade wp? I have one blog running 1.5.2, and I know that I need to do something about that.

I'm a long way from being convinced that duplicate content within a single site is actually an issue. I have always made it is easy as possible for SE's and surfers to find articles by whatever route suits them and I have never been aware of any problems as a result.

Anything is possible, but it really wouldn't be rational for Google, since its people know how blogs are structured, to penalize the ability to view the material in several ways.

However, if you do buy into these concerns, logically you would index the main page and pages, then take your pick from one of categories, archives or single posts. I would suggest leaving follow on throughout and just restrict indexing. If you are pulling in feeds, it might be a good idea to exclude that content, if you have a way to do so.

Surprisingly painless as a rule. You should check that any critical plugins are compatible, because some still have to catch up. Otherwise the only snag you may hit is that some forms of reference to the blogroll no longer work. If that catches you out, the fix is easy.

I strongly recommend backing up your database and installation, then deleting all your WP files (not the database tho), so you can be sure that nothing is lurking from the old setup.

Thanks, jayeff. :)

I haven't done anything with that plugin yet, as I need time to think through what seems to be the best route to take, or if any route needs to be taken at all.

The upgrade I have *got* to get done, and I much appreciate your input on how to go about that.

I would just go with the home page.

Upgrades are a pain and often the benefit isn't obvious. But one drawback with not upgrading regularly, is that one big leap may work for mankind, but not always with scripts.

That's fairly obvious: the reason I added another post is that I forget to say that you must diasable all plugins before the upgrade and re-enable them one at a time (the latest versions), checking your site between each.

For that reason, my instruction to delete all WP files was a little too broad. You would retain your plugin directory, any custom themes and also wp-config.php.

The upgrade, as jayeff has already pointed out, is painless really. This link gives comprehensive and easy instructions.

One thing that they warn about is the new versions of PHP and MySQL that are required to run WP 2.x

http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress

oops. Edit did work after all :)

If you are using the default theme and you have made any changes to it, do this:

Copy the default folder to a new folder name.
Go into the css file and change the name and description.
Change the theme being used from default to the new one you just created.

Now, whenever you update and upload new files, you will not lose any changes you made to the deafult layout.