WordPress 3.1 Disaster and a Fix

Upgrading to WordPress 3.1 was a complete disaster for me.  It became very hard to update my blog, because the following things happened:

  1. The visual editor broke, and HTML would show up when it was selected.
  2. I couldn’t insert media into posts… the Upload/Insert buttons were all broken.  The only way to insert media into my posts was to manually add HTML.
  3. It became impossible to set categories or add tags to posts.

I found a troubleshooting master list.  Everyone says to start by disabling plug-ins.  I was skeptical, and didn’t do that at first, but after trying a bunch of other things to no avail, such as reinstalling WordPress 3.1 and fiddling with file access privileges on my server, I finally gave in.  D’oh!  As soon as all plug-ins were disabled, everything miraculously started working!  After re-enabling the plug-ins one by one, I isolated the culprit – it’s the WP-Stats-Dashboard.  Its page claims it’s “Compatible up to: 3.1.”  Don’t believe it.  As of v2.5.5.2, it still breaks WordPress 3.1.

Update 2011-04-23: As of Version 2.6.1, it’s OK to use WP-Stats-Dashboard again.