Wordpress 2.5 Upgrade How To

Wordpress 2.5 came out a few weeks back and my WP 2.3.3 installation kept asking me to upgrade with that yellow warning bar just under the main admin menu. I kept putting it off until I had nothing else to do today so I went about preparing to do the upgrade.

Having done this before I had no real fear, I know that in general there is nothing to it if you follow the rules. Even if you run into problems, worldpress is such a wonderful software with such an amazing community that there is every chance someone else had the same problem - fixing it is as easy as googling the issue.

The things to do before you start upgrading
I always make sure I take all the precautions before I allow myself to start doing any major reconstruction of my blog.

So, the first things I do when I decide to do the wordpress upgrade are:

1. Deactivate all my plugins except the Wordpress Database Backup plugin since I will need it in step 2.

2. Using the Wordpress Database Backup plugin ( which I had installed on my blog ), I back up my wordpress database. If you don’t have it installed yet, you really should as it’s a lifesaver and it literally takes like 1 minute to install.

3. Using ftp I go to my wordpress directory and download the wp-content directory, the wp-config.php file and .htaccess file. The wp-config.php file contains all your database connection settings (username, password, server etc ), the .htaccess contains all your custom rewrite rules while the wp-content directory contains your themes and your plugins and you don’t want to lose any of those.

4. I download the latest wordpress version from wordpress.org.

So, having backed up my files and my database, I am ready to upgrade.

Upgrading to 2.5

There are various ways to do this. I choese a way that allows me to test and make sure my upgrade works before I commit to it.

1. Since my wordpress installation is in folder wp, I ftp-ed the new wordpress files to a folder called wordpress. ( This allows me to access the blog on here and test things without affecting my live blog )

2. I create a new database and restore my database backup ( the one on my desktop ) to this new database.

3. I upload my backed up wp-config.php, .htaccess and wp-content to this new wordpress folder making sure that the wp-config.php points to the new database I created.

So, my live site remains untouched on dnxpert.com/wp, while a test upgrade version now sits at dnxpert.com/wordpress connected to a restored version of the live database.

4. I then navigate to /wordpress/wp-admin/upgrade.php and of course I am prompted to upgrade my database.
Note: I ran into a problem here. Whenever I hit the upgrade button the upgrade process would indicate that the upgrade was successful only for wordpress to ask me to upgrade again. It kind of went into a wordpress upgrade loop. I finally figured out what was wrong ( for anyone that may have the same problem ). I have WP Security Scan installed and it was inadvertently wiping out the wordpress version and confusing the upgrade process. I removed all traces of this plugin and lo and behold the upgrade process worked.

5. Now that my test upgraded version of wordpress exists with the upgrade database, I click through and make sure everything is functional. I upgrade any plugins that need upgrading, I click around and check whether all the plugins work properly and once I am fully satisfied I proceed to delete the old wp directory, and to rename the wordpress directory to wp and finally the blog is ready to go.

That’s the Wordpress upgrade to version 2.5.

Easy isn’t it? Oh and in case you missed it, here is my list of Essential Wordpress Plugins.

Tags: upgrade loop, wordpress upgrade

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 3:23 pm and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.