WordPress upgrade: Lessons learnt

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WordPress was released on September 24^th(maybe different in different countries), but I hung on to WordPress 2.2 for a couple of weeks. The reason was simple - WordPress is known for bugs and woes in the first release of a new branch.

However, I read some frightening posts about vulnerabilities being exposed in previous versions. Recently, KylesCove was hacked, but luckily, there was no malicious intent, and the hacker just left a message advising to upgrade, inorder to prevent further hacks. That scared the life out of me! Besides, the new features like tagging were too much to resist.

Upgrading was a new job for me, and though I had read about Keith’s WPAU plugin, I decided to go the manual way. I had already set up a install of 2.3 on my PC(which was beta), and upgraded it for practice. The process was almost instant, and I was confident of a live upgrade as well.

I had backed up the database, and an export file, for emergency. However, there are some things that I botched up:

Forgot to deactivate all plugins: I do not know if this is a good thing - I forgot it completely. Luckily, WP seems to have taken care of it, and nothing is broken (save an un-compatible plugin which I deactivated).
Forgot to back up theme files and note the plugins used
Forgot to use the plugin to put the blog in maintenance mode

If you are upgrading, make sure to avoid these mistakes - I learnt them the hard way.

October 5th, 2007 Leave a comment

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4 Comments

azwan said on October 6th, 2007

problem with wordpress is there’s too much frequent upgrade.

thanks you you visit
Post authorSumesh said on October 6th, 2007

@Azwan: True, agree with you. And to make matters worse, WordPress unveiled a new release calendar early 2006, which quickens the pace even more. However, its fine to stay on a branch - as a matter of fact, I had thought of upgrading directly to 2.4, from 2.2. But the new features got me excited.
Karthik said on October 7th, 2007

Did you mean 2008? If so, that’s interesting, its hardly two months away!
WordPress problems and dilemmas said on October 15th, 2007

[...] 2.3 was launched some time back, amid much fanfare. Most bloggers held out for bug fixes, and I did the same. Looking back, there were a few positives and some [...]