Upgrading WordPress

It’s been over 1 month since I wrote here but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been blogging; I just have been writing elsewhere, namely in my games blog (follow the ludossier link on the sidebar). Today I upgraded my three blogs to WordPress 2.7, which has a completely redesigned Dashboard, easier to use and with more functionalities. Although some of my previous posts explaining WordPress have become slightly outdated in some places, they’re still valid for the most part. The interface looks different, but the organisation of the panels remained the same. So, the WordPress features are still in the same place and are obtained in the same way.

I first looked up the Codex to see how to upgrade a WordPress installation, but I didn’t like the process. It involves backing up the current installation and then overwriting it with the new installation, but making sure to handle some special cases. It sounded too fidgety to me. So, I came up with the following process, and so far I haven’t found any errors in the upgraded blogs.

1. Log into your blog’s administration panels and deactivate any plugins that might conflict with the upgrade. For example, I deactivated a plugin that improves the menu structure, because it has been completely changed in version 2.7.
2. Log out of WordPress and log into your web host’s cPanel.
3. Backup the MySQL database containing your blog’s posts, pages, categories and tags, as explained in an earlier post.
4. In cPanel’s file manager, rename the root of your current blog to some other name. Continuing the example, I renamed the public_html/michel/ludossier folder to public_html/michel/ludossier26 (to remind me it uses WordPress 2.6).
5. Install WordPress 2.7 using Fantastico, in the way described previously in this blog. Create a new blog with exactly the same parameters as you created the original blog, i.e. with the same name, in the same folder, and with the same administrator username and password as the old blog you want to upgrade. For the example, I created a blog called ludossier in the ludossier folder.
6. Go into the file manager of cPanel and copy (not move!) file wp-config.php from the old blog’s folder to the new blog’s folder, e.g. from /public_html/michel/ludossier26 to /public_html/michel/ludossier.
7. Look under the wp-content folder for any new plugins, themes and files you have uploaded to your old blog, and copy them to the corresponding place in the new blog’s folders.
8. Log into your blog as usual. WordPress will say that the database needs to be updated and ask you to press a button. Do so and you’re done!

Basically, the whole idea is to create in the same folder as the old blog a new blog that uses the latest WordPress software (steps 4-5). It has to be the same folder: otherwise all URLs used by the blog (like the permalinks of your posts) would break. We then transfer the configuration from the current blog to the new one (steps 6-7). Note that although Fantastico created a new MySQL database for the new blog in step 5, step 6 makes the new blog use the same database as the current blog. Hence we need step 3 to back the old version up, in case something nasty happens.