WordPress was released on September 24th(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.