WP 3.1 Upgrade Problem and Resolution

Since I ran into this with a few of the sites I upgraded, I thought it might be good to preemptively pass this along.

For these sites I had been using a custom Artisteer 3 column theme. When I upgraded to 3.1 the columns were all messed up - the right one would wrap to the bottom of the page. I thought it must be a problem with the theme, but trying other themes that were 3.1 compatible gave the same results.

So I thought maybe it was a plugin problem - so I set up a test site and tried to recreate the problem with no pugs - no luck. Everything aligned perfectly with a new install. Installed all the plugins - no difference. Then I noticed that the alignment problem on the other sites was only on the first page - viewing the actual post made everything align okay.

Somehow, someway it had to be content related. On a whim, I exported some of the old posts from a site I was having problems with, and imported them into the test site - whammo! That screwed up the layout. Something in the posts created pre WP 3.1 was not jiving.

The fix? Edit, view the visual edit and save the top few posts. Because viewing individual posts wasn't an issue, I only had to do that for posts that were featured on the home page.

Hopefully no one else will have this issue - it was very frustrating and I couldn't find any web conversations about it at the time. Maybe it was just something quirky with my content (mostly Amazon auto posts on these sites) - but in case something with post layout comes up maybe this will help.

EL