mysql -u <user> -p<password>
mysql> CREATE DATABASE wordpress;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO ‘wpuser’@'localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘dbpassword’;
mysql> SET PASSWORD FOR ‘wpuser’@'localhost’ = OLD_PASSWORD(‘dbpassword’);
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> quit;

If you’ve tried using the Postie plug-in (version 1.1.1, anyway) with WordPress 2.3, you’ve probably seen that the feature related to Categories do not work. The database schema changed for WordPress2.3, and Postie was reading categories directly from the tables with SQL calls.

Thanks to efforts of a few others, who nearly got it right, I managed to cobble together a fix that allows emailed posts to be categorized and add a default category to emailed posts that do not include category details. Credit/kudos to Olivier and Greg and Benjamin for comments and work referenced on the Postie page.

I don’t mean to detract from the work these gentlemen did before I stumbled across the same problem. I tried implementing their corrections, but had a different problem that nobody else mentioned: only a fraction of my established categories appeared in the list on the config page. It had similar problems locating Categories specified in the email subject. The solution was to provide an additional parameter in the call to get_categories(). For efficiency, I also pulled the call to create a local list of categories out of a foreach loop, so that the same work wasn’t being done multiple times, in the case of an email specifying multiple categories. (Always optimyze…)

Instructions

Follow the instructions for installing Postie. Then, either download and install the two files from this zip archive, or edit the two files as shown below.

Edit config_form.php from the postie plugin directory. Search for “DEFAULT_POST_CATEGORY” and replace the line with the SELECT query with the new code shown below:
<td><select name="DEFAULT_POST_CATEGORY" id="DEFAULT_POST_CATEGORY">
<?php
//$categories = $wpdb->get_results(”SELECT * FROM $wpdb->categories ORDER BY cat_name”);
$categories = get_categories(array(’orderby’ =>’name’, ‘get’ =>’all’));
foreach ($categories as $category) {
$selected = ($category->cat_ID == $config[”DEFAULT_POST_CATEGORY”] ? “SELECTED”: NULL);
echo “\n\t<option value=’$category->cat_ID’ $selected>$category->cat_name</option>”;
}
?>
</select></td>
Finally, edit postie-functions.php,
function GetPostCategories(&$subject)
{
$config = GetConfig();
global $wpdb;
$post_categories = array();
$matches = array();
//try and determine category
if ( preg_match('/(.+): (.*)/', $subject, $matches)) {
$subject = trim($matches[2]);
$matches[1] = array($matches[1]);
}
else if (preg_match_all('/\[(.[^\[]*)\]/', $subject, $matches)) {
preg_match("/](.[^\[]*)$/",$subject,$subject_matches);
$subject = trim($subject_matches[1]);
}
else if ( preg_match_all('/-(.[^-]*)-/', $subject, $matches) ) {
preg_match("/-(.[^-]*)$/",$subject,$subject_matches);
$subject = trim($subject_matches[1]);
}
$categories = get_categories(array(’orderby’ =>’name’, ‘get’ =>’all’));
if (count($matches)) {
foreach($matches[1] as $match) {
$match = trim($match);
$category = NULL;
print(”Working on $match\n”);
//Work on the category search to see if we can determine the cat_id
//check the database to see if their is a category similar
foreach ($categories as $category) {
if ($match == $category->cat_name) {
$post_categories[] = $category->cat_ID;
print(” Match: $category->cat_name\n”);
continue;
}
if ($match == $category->cat_ID) {
$post_categories[] = $category->cat_ID;
print(” Match: $category->cat_name\n”);
continue;
}
if (strpos($category->cat_name,$match) !== false) {
$post_categories[] = $category->cat_ID;
print(” Match: $category->cat_name\n”);
}
}
}
}
if (!count($post_categories)) {
$post_categories[] = $config[”DEFAULT_POST_CATEGORY”];
}
print(”Posting categories: “);
print_r($post_categories);
print(”\n”);
return($post_categories);
}
Source: Entropy in the Stairway Blog

My previous 2.0.11 installation was having DB collation and Character Set configured as latin1 (by default with WordPress 2.0.x).

Bad thing happened when I exported my sql db and reimported in new 2.3.1 installation (defaulting at UTF-8) and saw all accented characters displayed as question marks, ugly signs, etc.

I also tried exporting as UTF-8 in WP 2.0, but soon realized that WP 2.0.x does not include support for UTF-8 Character Set.

Found a solution in a blog, and reporting it here to avoid spending again two days in future Googling… and testing.

MySQL Export command from WordPress 2.0.11:

mysqldump -a –add-drop-table –databases -u <username with privileges> -p <database_name> > <filename>.sql

MySQL Import command on WordPress 2.3.1 box:

cat <filename>.sql | mysql –default-character-set=utf8 -u <username with privileges> -p <database_name>

Also. remember to check for presence in your wp-config.php of two very important lines:

define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

Especially the first line: if it’s missing, WordPress will still display ugly characters even if in tables they are properly formatted.

WordPress database error: Table <tablename>.wp_post2cat doesn’t exist

nasty error.

I dug a bit on the Net and found it was a plugin, in my case Goosle Sitemap plugin, doing a query like

SELECT * FROM wp_categories

when this table is not anymore in WP 2.3.1.

Updating the plugin fixed the issue.