hi, i'm jenn

as i’ve mentioned, updating my site yesterday was more painful than it could have been. i’m going to document some of my mistakes so that if folks google something about updating from wordpress 2.0.X to 3.0.1 they might find this helpful.

I’m using a click through for the body of the post because it’s long, nerdy, and most importantly because I’ve figured out how to easily do this. so it’s your choice whether you want the dirty details!

dirty details

1. I went to the update wordpress site and decided to follow the instructions loosely since i’m pretty sure my wordpress installation was from 2007 and i don’t remember much about doing it. i won’t claim to have checked the minimum requirements – even if i had i would have made the same mistake.
   mistake: check the minimum requirements. and it’s not enough to make sure that your hosting supports the minimum versions – you should also make sure that your database is at the minimum version.
2. I backed up my database (good jenn!), and deactivated plugins (goodbye dolly!).
   mistake: i didn’t backup my wordpress directory. yes, i suck. but the instructions make things look oh so very simple. what could go wrong really?
3. Grabbed the new version of wordpress, unzipped it locally and then copied it over my old wordpress directory. Visited my website – got a message that the version of my database was not compatible with wordpress 3.0.1. awesome.
   mistake: remember the mistake i mentioned before? not backing up my wordpress directory? yeah, there wasn’t any rolling back for me.
4. Spent the next few minutes googling to figure out what version of wordpress would work with my database version while cursing my hosting provider for not having mySql 5. i might have obtained and started to upload wordpress version 2.6.
   mistake: i, uh, didn’t think about the fact that my database doesn’t update itself as my host adds support for newer versions of mysql. so all i had to do was migrate my database to the newer version to get it up to somewhere wordpress would support. luckily i found this article and might have said “duh” out loud.
5. I upgraded the database, and changed the values in the wp-config.php and hit my blog. Held my breath. Error messages.
   mistake: don’t hold breath. nothing ever works right when you hold your breath. also, if you’re updating wordpress remember to visit wp-admin/upgrade.php. hrmph.
6. after i visited upgrade.php things looked good – and boy have things changed (i should upgrade more often don’t cha think)! the dashboard said i needed to upgrade some plugins. was excited about the auto upgrade feature and tried it out. but despite waiting (i.e. going to bed) things never completed.
   mistake: not so much a mistake – more of a “thanks google for teaching me something new” – but i found this article that said to enable wordpress automatic updates on 1and1 sites you need to modify the .htaccess file. things started to work
7. now that my blog was back and happy, and i could install plugins so uber easily, i decided to grab Flickr Gallery to get photos back up. When I created my static page, preview worked fine but I got 404 errors after I published the static page. I disabled all plugins and still had the same problem. Back to google I went and learned that permalinks were the likely problem. To confirm this I changed the setting to default for permalink format and the problem went away.
   mistake: The rewrite rules for my pretty urls needed to be updated (info on permalinks). When I changed my permalink option back to a pretty one, things started to work just fine.

And now that my blog is under control, it’s time to start my day. Hopefully this information will be helpful – and not just for my sanity.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 16th, 2010 at 8:31 am and is filed under nerd stuff, wordpress. 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.