Just upgraded to Wordpress 2.8. The automatic update didn’t work; this seems to be a continual problem which stems from wordpress not being in the default location. For some reason, it wants to push from the new version rather than pull under these circumstances. Not good.

So, I did the manual upgrade; unfortunately the admin page crashed out with an error:

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function read() on a non-object in wp-includes/theme.php on line 387

This has been reported here and here

It’s this bit of code causing the problems.

$template_dir = @ dir("$theme_root/$template");
        if ( $template_dir ) {
            while ( ($file = $template_dir->read()) !== false ) {
// etc

It appeared to be only be my modified version of the theme (Evanesence) causing the problem; it’s not very modified, so I removed them one by one. For no readily apparent reason the problem appears to be a subdirectory called “images.old”. Surely, not a good reason for a crash.

Weird and wonderful.