We have just upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 from 2.1 and I was expecting lots of problems and incompatibilities. Not so.

A sweet conversion and one-click upgrade of plugins made life a lot easier. Although the backend is very different and will take some getting used to, the impression is one of great improvement, even from version 2.3.3. I understand there was no 2.4. Mysterious.

This was undoubtedly the smoothest upgrade I’ve ever experienced. Well done Wordpress and its brilliant community of open source programmers.

I’m looking for anyone who can bring a little vorsprung durch technik to a “simple” Wordpress problem.

We have a site with 23,000 spam comments in the moderation panel. Wordpress only allows zapping 20 at a time, or a huge process of downloading the whole mess bucket, which invariably hangs the computer.

I’m seeking a quick way to zap the lot, maybe serverside using the MySQL panel. Has any bright spark got a handle on this?

Reward in Heaven.

Returning to the subject covered in a recent post here on Google’s change of format for Adsense blocks which occur more than three times on a page, we have now reduced the default Wordpress posts-per-page package from 10 to three.

So, if you want to read more than the top three posts — and why not? –just click on the link “Previous entries”. You will then be presented with nearly 700 posts dished up three at a time.

This gets round the awkward cut off after three posts, when Google puts up “This web page cannot be found”, or at least triggers it locally.

I hope this will gain more aesthetically than it loses in convenience. Please let me know if you have any problems.

Update : Aaron Brazell of Wordpress fame has addressed this question over on his Technosailor blog. You can find his thoughts here.

In Wordpress 2.0.x there was a simple facility to bulk change the link categories for numbers of links. Unless I’m mistaken, that appears to have been dropped from 2.1.x.

I’ve just imported 52 links to what’s now called the Blogroll (it used to be “Links”) and have had to add the link category individually to each one. To say that’s time-consuming is an understatement, especially if you have lots of sites to do.

In earlier versions of WP, you could set the link category default then import links, using AdminMySQL on the server, and they would automatically slot into the default.

In 2.0.x, this didn’t happen, but you could switch the whole lot to the same category with a couple of clicks.

Now, even that’s disappeared, and a pre-industrial, “by hand” method is all that’s left.

Am I missing something here? Anyone know?