Steps to Upgrading Wordpress

Posted by rockcat on February 13, 2009

Since I have spent all evening upgrading Wordpress and trying to add my websites to my profile on http://dashboard.wordpress.com, I thought I would offer advise. That advise is: tired kids, a distracted husband and a late hour are NOT good components of a painless update (which updating wordpress normally is).

Pre-reqs:

• You’ll have to google any acronyms you don’t understand, I no longer care for clarity.
• Wordpress.COM has free, hosted blogs. Wordpress.ORG has the software (also free) so that you can host your own blog on your server. They are different, but connected.

Steps:

• Deciding to put my wordpress.com blogs, which I don’t use (because of UI issues) onto one account. This required a brand new account of course.
• Reading the Wordpress FAQ (Great job to them for putting the link right where I needed it).
• Learning that CLI still triumphs GUI for getting the job done (if you don’t know what those are, google them, I’m to tired to explain acronyms). Oh and the issue was that the GUI skipped some files. Super-important ones, not the readme.txt.
• Looking up how to get rid of locks on SVN.
• Telling the kids that yes, Mommy loves you, she is just in a 20+ step process (that must be done correctly and in order) for 4 separate blogs (normally 6, and she can’t lose track of where each is in the process). So Mommy is busy, and she can’t cuddle or play even though she wants too. And that its late, children should be sleeping anyhow.
• Having to checkout new copies of my SVN repository TWICE, because I screwed up and was to tired to fix my errors.
• Glad that the first three blogs didn’t cause as much trouble as the last one.
• Goggling a nice, vague error (which turned into one of the previous support requests).
• Wishing I had a nice adult beverage.
• Wishing a genie would do this for me.

So now I’m trying to decide if I like the new WP dashboard. I like the quickpost anyway. It needs more AJAX – having to click twice to get to my destination is SO 2006.

I’d like to add that the issues were not the fault of wordpress.org (great software), wordpress.com (great service), subversion (my best friend), google (my other best friend), my kids (who are finally asleep) or my cat (who was absent the whole time). And it’s not my fault either. Hmmm, does that make it YOUR fault???

I’m going to pull up YouTube and watch cartoons now.

P.S. Happy Friday the 13th!