GUID Fix Plugin (Important for RAMP Customers)

Yesterday we released CF GUID-Fix, a plugin to address an issue that could cause problems for folks using our RAMP content-deployment product for WordPress (my previous post about RAMP).1

There were versions of WordPress prior to 3.1 that had a bug that caused pages and some custom post types to have non-unique GUID values. This was fixed in WordPress 3.1, but the data has never been cleaned up. This means that pages and/or custom post types on your site that were created back in the 3.0 days may have this problem, while other pages and/or custom post type content is just fine.

It’s a real problem for RAMP customers because RAMP relies on GUIDs being unique. RAMP uses GUIDs to properly associate content between WordPress instances (staging and production), and to maintain relationships between posts, pages, attachments, etc. If the GUIDs are not unique, then RAMP might update the wrong page when trying to push content from staging to production. We are adding a few additional safeguards around this issue within RAMP for the next release (it will prompt you to run the GUID-Fix if needed).

Our CF GUID-Fix plugin will clean up this data in your database. It’s a “run-once, then delete” type of plugin.

This fix is crucial for RAMP customers, but it’s a good idea for everyone. GUIDs are exposed in feeds, so if your WordPress site is generating feeds that include pages or custom post types that were created in WordPress 3.0, your feeds may be invalid due to non-unique (duplicate) GUIDs for items in the feed. And any other plugins or WordPress tools that (reasonably) expect GUIDs to be unique will be pleased as well.

Hopefully this will be addressed in a future WordPress release but as with anything in a project as big as WordPress, it’s never as easy as we’d all hope. You never want the cure to be worse than the disease, so moving judiciously is always the right thing to do.

  1. If you are a RAMP customer, you should have received an email with this information and more yesterday afternoon. If you didn’t receive this, please let me know. [back]

This post is part of the project: RAMP. View the project timeline for more context on this post.