A couple months ago I wrote up a tutorial on how to use Wordpress as a Membership Directory. The problem was that the tutorial was using Wordpress 2.3 and a week later version 2.5 came out. After letting Wordpress, to advance to version 2.5.1, I decided to upgrade the PghDesigners.com website.

To be honest, I was really dreading doing this upgrade.

To my pleasure, after speaking with the very helpful Mike Houghton of Refresh Tallahassee (a WP Membership Site), I found that he had little-to-no problems with following my tutorial on a Wordpress 2.5.1 setup. This was great news for me, but he built it from the beginning on the new version of WP - and I would be upgrading. I knew things shouldn't be that much different, but I just didn't know what to expect.

Upgrading the Plugins

So after doing all the typical database backups, I started the process. I first uploaded all the new versions of the plugins that I had been using:

• Askimet - For spam filtering
• Article Templates - To pre-configure my "New Member" post templates
• GeneralStats - To show the number of members
• Improved Include Page - To insert the ads
• IWG Hide Dashboard - Removed
• Mail From - Changing a WP option
• Role Manager - To specify which a Subscriber or a Designer could do within the dashboard
• WP-DBManager - To make database backups
• WP User Manager - The heart of the site

Upgrading the Wordpress Core Files

Then after uploading the new Wordpress files, I upgraded the database, and then started testing things. Everything looked good expect for the fact that anyone not with the Administrator Role couldn't sign in. Minor inconvenience, huh?

The Problem & The Fix

After a lot of testing back and forth, I found that it was the Hide Dashboard and Role Manager plugins causing the problem. When these plugins were activated, users couldn't log in. When they were deactivated, things were back to normal.

The work around that I found was that after ditching the Hide Dashboard plugin all together, I could activate Role Manager only when I needed to make changes to the Roles. Much of this plugin's data is still in use even after you disable the plugin - so it worked out great. I was able to take advantage of this plugin's features, even if I had it disabled (which I needed to do - my members needed to be able to sign in).