Upgrade to WordPress 2.2 Successful!
That’s it! I’ve bitten the bullet and updated my WP install - and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be! The best advice I can give for this process is to follow the detailed upgrade instructions to the letter!
I did run into two issues:
Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin. This was re-activated after I’d updated my Permalink structure, and wouldn’t work properly until I’d done it again. I spent 2 hours trying to solve this before I found a random post on the WP forums!
Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form. This is failing with a reference to the functions.php include file. I’ve sent a message to the developers, and I am currently waiting for their response.
In addition to managing to pull that off, I’ve also spent all day (literally the last 10 hours) with my face buried in more than 400,000 lines of IonCube encoded PHP - so I’m gonna skip on a proper post again today. I’ve got a couple of fun things lined up for tomorrow though - and one thing especially for anyone in the UK!
If you get stuck with your update then feel free to drop me a line. I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to help, but I’m certainly happy to try! 
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Hi Paul. I’ve gotten feedback from others that they are using the contact form plugin on version 2.2 without issue. Thus I suspect it’s related to something else — what, though, I don’t know. Our plugin doesn’t interact with functions.php file that I know of. On the WP version I have functions.php line 282 (as you noted in your email) is this:
function is_serialized($data). So, I guess I’m sort of at a loss as to what it could be.Not sure what contact form version you have (not that it should matter) but you might want to get the latest one, disable other plugins, and try it out. If that goes well then try enabling your other plugins one-at-a-time. if that doesn’t work, perhaps someone at the WP forums might have an idea.
You might also want to check your error logs along the way just to see if somethings being recorded that isn’t being displayed on the page.
Thanks for the reply Mike.
I’ll do a bit of testing during some downtime these evening, and see if I can find the source of the issue. It’s a bit strange though, because nothing at all has changed apart from the WP update…
Do let me know what you discover. I hear you on nothing being changed, which adds to the mystery, unless it’s one of the other plugins and it is working differently on the new version. That’s purely speculation, though.
By the way, the edit comment feature you have here is pretty cool.
I have seen your same error you got on one additional blog. I’m curious, did you deactivate your plugins before upgrading. I ask because a person reported on another site that his upgrade went smoothly (and he’s using the form). I have heard from others too that they didn’t have an issue, such as what Mike Jolley reported (he upgraded too). If you didn’t deactivate your plugins before upgrading, maybe that is the issue — just trying to think of possibilities.
Because it’s the first on-the-fly update for me, I followed the WP advice to the letter - including the de- and re-activation of my plugins. I’ll have a bit of a play later, once I’ve blown off some steam beating my mate at pool…
Mike: I’ve now gone through a complete de-activation of other plugins, and I get the same failure - even with just yours active! I’m pretty sure it’s not your plugin though, as I found references online to similar errors connected to PHPNuke, OS Commerce etc.
I’ve tried to play with line 282. I believe that it’s something new in the code, and I also believe that there’s a typo somewhere on the line (to do with variables named with and without $) or just before (to do with the preg matching). I’m not good enough at PHP to debug something like that without context - and that takes time I haven’t got at the moment!
It could be that something in this theme is triggering the issue, or it may be something to do with the way my server is configured. Either would explain why I’m the first to have the fault.
Don’t worry about it for now (unless you want to report it to WP). I’ll make do with raw email until 2.2.1 comes out.
For anyone else reading this, the issue is not the fault of the plugin - which is superb, highly flexible, and definitely worth installing on your blog!
Thanks Paul. I did some searching myself at WordPress but only found a couple of references and the threads terminated with nothing of value so it was a dead end. It’s a strange issue. I will be keeping my ears open.
I upgraded yesterday as well, along with my sandbox blog which runs on a separate db under the same domain. Ran into some really weird trouble with both of them, and had some files just up and disappear. I still don’t know what to make of it. I managed to smooth things out only to find my site down again this morning.
I’m running UTW and the contact form as well, but I was careful to disable all plugins as directed. (I learned that lesson the hard way about a year ago.)
I ended up finally having to use the one-click upgrade feature provided by my host to fix everything, and it worked like a charm. All I could do then was attribute it to user error! Anyway I’m rambling sorry. My point is I feel your pain Paul! 
I keep thinking I should be getting better at these upgrades (this being about my 4th one) but it seems like every time something goes wrong.
Hey Paul,
I upgraded mine to 2.2 last week as well and like you didn’t run into too many problems. The one big irritation was that my top commentators plugin stopped working. However, I see that yours seems to be working fine. Might I ask which one you’re using?
Thanks in advance!
Sure thing Jon! I’m running ‘Show Top Commentators’ by Nate Sanden. You’ll find it here: http://www.pfadvice.com/wordpress-plugins/show-top-commentators.
Thanks for dropping by!
Hey thanks for posting that link! I tried a top commenters plugin about a week ago but it just refused to work (can’t recall the name). I’ve been meaning to look into some other plugins of that variety but haven’t got around to it yet. You just saved me some time thanks!
Hi Paul,
Hope you had a good day today.
Did you delete your wp-admin folder prior to the upgrade? I’m asking because after my upgrade, my new-post.php and new-page.php (in the Dashboard) did not work properly - I got a 404 page of my blog in the upload area. I’m glad I did a full backup -as instructed- and now back to 2.1.2. Any idea whether it would matter if I would leave the wp-admin folder intact and then upgrade?
Thanks and take care.
Dirk: Yes, I deleted the wp-admin folder (as the instructions tell you to). Quite a few files changed names and locations, hence why the recommendation was to delete and re-upload, rather than simply over-writing stuff.
It sounds to me like perhaps the files didn’t upload correctly - so it might be worth trying again. Did you run the upgrade.php script before trying to use it?
Charity: My pleasure!
What a nightmare! At the end of the day (and a fresh wp2.2 install later) it turned out to be a problem with Slickr plugin. Still some work to do but biggest challenge is to get UTW (and Slickr) back to work.
Take care.