Posted by Vince Wadhwani on Jan 08, 2008

Typo (the software that powers this blog) got a bump to version 5.0.2 yesterday and the team went through all the themes and got them working again. It's really amazing how much of an improvement v5 is over 4.1.1 -- hopefully it'll convince me to blog more often (about relevant stuff..). One thing frequent visitors may notice is a new theme.. I'm still doing some polishing but I think I may keep this one unless there are any objections. The upgrade to v5 has a few snafus so click through if you're interested..

The first thing you need to know is that you'll need Rails 2.0 and the rcov gem. I'd recommend upgrading to the lastest version (1.0.1 as of this writing) of rubygems if you haven't already. Once you've got the rcov gem and rails installed you'll need to migrate your database. I strongly recommend you backup or copy your db first before you start. When you're ready to go it's just the usual rake db:migrate to update.

One of the big changes to this version was the handling of the sidebar.. many plugins were removed from the core so you may need to reinstall them. If you get an error, check your logs.. it couldn't hurt to empty the sidebar table in your database too if you're still having trouble.

Last thing is ... beware the themes.. Typo 5 ships with 3 themes but if you want to install another one make sure you do it carefully. My two favorites, lush and lucid, didn't work out of the box. If you've got a live blog that gets decent traffic you'll want to do all your theme experimenting on your local machine first!