As long as your theme is well coded, you shouldn’t have any issues with an update. That said, take a look at the feature list of 3.1 and see if anything directly affects something you’re using in your theme.
I’ve only had one client that needed some changes to his theme due to the 3.1 upgrade. We had some custom page templates that queried posts based on custom fields. WordPress improved the custom field querying abilities, but in the process broke the old way of doing it. It took about 5 minutes to fix once we realized what needed fixing.
I hope that helps.
>>>>Having read all of the situations out there, and not wanting to step on any of the land mines myself, I feel it would be good to get prepared ahead of time, instead of mopping up later
Probably 10000 people downloaded 3.1 already. Maybe 10 prominently posted errors here; chances are you are lucky alerady without knowing it;;
Install 3.1 and that themne you desire on a PC test install; you might find it works perfectly in 3.1
Still missing a point here, if we have a blog that we value, then we do not leave it to chance.
We should have a local test, and staging WordPress install with different databases, the staging can be in a subfolder on our production site or as a local WAMP or LAMP, test is a local install, I use both.
So we have three databases and three installs, all plugins, upgrades etc, are run on the test then staging database, evaluated then deployed based on testing results.
I first upgrade my WAMP database, nothing de-activated or changed, with the Theme check plugin and debug active, no errors, tested links, posts, pages and plugins then the staging databse then the production websites.
This is called risk manangement!
David
Yeah. That’s what I did, but on the server itself. Have a separate Multisite install with a bunch of test blogs on it. Upgraded it first and sequentially cycled through the themes used on the big install. They all work. Couple of issues with plugins that need updating but, other than that, no problems.
