On Upgrading WordPress

Moving to WordPress 2.6 was not one of the easy upgrades.

However, I’m not sure that the fault was with the software. At least, not initially.

I downloaded the archive, and got my files in order, reader to upload to my server. And away the files went.

WordPress has lots of files. All told, it took a good twenty minutes.

I went to log in…

And got a whole lotta errors.

It turned out that my FTP client had decided not to upload all the files. Only some of the files. And the ones it didn’t upload? Chosen pretty much at random.

Thus, began to re-upload the files. And again, this took a while.

All told, I think I made three attempts at uploading the contents of one particular directory. First, some upgrade scripts didn’t upload. Then some CSS files decided not to go.

Then, once the upgrade script ran, WordPress refused to let me log in to the administration panels. I discovered from digging through the WordPress Support Fora that I had to clear my Internet cache and delete cookies on my computer, which seems more like a bug and less like a security feature.

What I thought would have been a twenty, twenty-five minute fix took a good two hours total.

It kept me from the All-Star Game, but I didn’t miss a hell of a lot. That game was like the Energizer Bunny — it kept going, and going, and going…

I eventually gave up on that, somewhere around the thirteenth inning. I realized, glumly, that the substitutions on the field, in some cases, played a full nine-inning game, while the starters put in token appearances.

In any event, the new layout for the website? That’s going to wait a couple of days.

Published by Allyn

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

4 thoughts on “On Upgrading WordPress

  1. I know, I’m such a trailblazer. 😉

    Once I had all the files on the server, WordPress was fine. Once I had the cache cleared, the WordPress admin screens came back. (There’s a lengthy debate on the WordPress fora about what happened; it looks like a bug, and two cookies are assigned the same name but different data.)

    As for the layout, I’m having second thoughts. I’ll reconsider over the weekend.

    I’m not sure why I want to change, except that I’m feeling an itch. It’s probably work avoidance. That’s probably the deal.

  2. I’m not sure if this will help, but here’s what I do when I upgrade WP on my site:

    1/ grab the .tar.gz from the official site.
    2/ upload it to my site.
    3/ use the File Manager in my web site’s control panel to expand the archive, then make any changes to the unzipped files.
    4/ finally, copy the directory over the existing wordpress install.

    If only Movable Type (which I use for my main blog) was easy to update. 🙂

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