“Never change a running system” – to be honest, I have never been much of a fan of this slogan. It’s not that easy to please me and even if I am quite satisfied, I always look for improvements. Sometimes, this can result in lots of problems. I tend to forget that, which is (ironically) the reason why I’m writing this blog post – it’s much harder to forget about stuff you wrote about (at least that’s true for me).

So WordPress is this ever-changing content management system that makes it quite easy to come up with a cool blog (as you can see). However, it seems to be an even bigger fan of upgrades than me, so whenever there’s a new version out, the admin control panel (this is where I write posts like this one and spend my free time) annoys me to death by showing the “WordPress X.X is out – upgrade now!” message on top of EVERY container in which I can do things like writing posts, edit pages, changing the look and feel of the page and so on. You can guess what happened, I downloaded the latest WordPress version. And while I was at it, I thought I could also download the new version of my theme (that would be the Fusion theme – powered by digitalnature).

As it turned out, that was one of the worse ideas I had today… First of all, my Search button (that would be the cool thing on the right with the picture of a magnifying-glass) disappeared. Even worse, my categories seemed to be gone for good. While the Search button might not be that important (although I think it’s a cool feature and I LOVE cool features, I’m just a big geek), I couldn’t really get over the loss of my categories. A few minutes later, I realized my various Widgets weren’t collapsible anymore (try it out, if you click on “Twitter”, it will hide the Twitter messages! I bet you never tried that before. Isn’t that freaking awesome?!). Or, to sum this paragraph up in a sentence: My site looked like shit.

As I’m one of the laziest people around when it comes to backups, I naturally did NOT save my old files. Be warned! Don’t do that yourself! Use infinite backups for whatever you’re doing with your PC… Well anyways, there was no real turning back, so I had to invest some more time and try to figure out what went wrong. I want to spare you the story of my search for a “known issues” part on the homepage of digitalnature (as there is no such part and therefore it would be quite redundant to mention that in the first place) or my epic quest for a dowloadable version of an earlier version of the Fusion theme. So well, in the end I figured I should just remove some of my Widgets (- ahh… Widgets… I tend to use that term all the time without ever explaining it. Well, a Widget is a little container in the sidebar. So I use a “Search Widget”, a “Category Widget”, a “Twitter Widget” and so on – now you know what that is) and see if that would help. And then I realized that the new Fusion theme considers the Search and the Categories as OPTIONAL Widgets. Meaning: They are not implemented if you use the standard settings.

“Are you fucking kidding me?!” was my initial response… but well, dragging these two Widgets in my sidebar again worked great and my site looked almost as cool as it used to be. Figuring out that the Widgets are now using the class tag “title” instead of “widgettitle” put my “Hackadelic Widget Voodoo” (yes, that’s actually the name of this Plug-In) Plug-In back in place and now the Widgets are also collapsible again (come on! Click them again! You know you want to!)!

Why I’m writing all this? Well, first of all, if you’re a WordPress user and you stumble over similar problems, this might be helpful! Secondly, I couldn’t stand the idea of having lost 60 minutes of my life without getting anything back from them. So I figured I could as well write about the loss so I got some more content on my page. Last but not least, I could show everyone that “embrace change” is NOT always the way to go (which reminds me of this great comic story “Secret Invasion” that I read the day before yesterday – go check it out, it’s awesome!)!