I recently updated to WordPress 2.0.3, basically as soon as I noticed it was available. It was touted as a “security fix” release, so I thought it would be a good idea to upgrade ASAP. However, it introduced a few bugs, that while not extremely detrimental, were nonetheless annoying.

The first bugs I noticed were WordPress adding backslashes (“\”) before some quotes in comments and link descriptions, either after they had been posted or edited. This appeared to be an improper call to the PHP addslashes() function, since it was translating phrases like “it’s” into “it\’s”, and is the common way to escape a string before input in to something like a SQL statement. However, it appears it was being called more than once.

I found no way to get rid of the backslashes, other than manually editing the table record, and furthermore, didn’t know how to fix this behaviour. I figured I’d just deal with it, since I don’t really blog that much, and surely a new version will be out soon.

But, while browsing one day, I found this post detailing another blogger’s experience with these bugs. Luckily, they had been more persistant than I, and had found a helpful link to a “tuneup” plugin that specifically fixed these problems introduced in WordPress 2.0.3. I just installed it, and everything appears to be back to normal. I’m not sure why the WordPress crew hasn’t decided to announce and link to this fix, as I think it’s quite essential for proper operation.

Recommended as a “must-have” plugin for WordPress 2.0.3.