59ideas

After procrastinating for a short while, I decided to slowly upgrade all my WordPress 2.0 blogs to the 2.1 series.

Although there are problems, gotchas and even downgrade reported, it really isn’t so frightening.

On the WordPress site there are some excellent documentation on upgrading. Be sure to read them first.

After reading them, I had worked out a few steps that is differ from the instruction which I’m sharing here. (Be sure you understand what you are doing if you want to try following them.)

If you have a few blogs, try it out first on the less trafficed blog.

I decided not to Delete the old WordPress files. Over time I had added many files and folders to my WordPress folder. Isolating what to delete and what to keep is too time consuming. Instead I just overwrite with all the files from the 2.1.2 download.

Note that this will not work if you had make changes directly to WordPress files. In most case, stay clear of editing core files.

Next I do a compare with unix diff command. If you are on a Windows platform you might want to try WinMerge.

diff -rq wordpress/ www/

There isn’t too much difference so I copy out all the differences and make it into a list of command.

cd wp-includes
rm wp-l10n.php
rm template-functions-post.php
rm template-functions-links.php
rm template-functions-general.php
rm template-functions-category.php
rm template-functions-author.php
rm pluggable-functions.php
rm links.php
rm functions-post.php
rm functions-formatting.php
rm functions-compat.php
rm feed-functions.php
comment-functions.php
rm js/dbx-key.js
rm js/tinymce/plugins/autosave/langs/cs.js
rm js/tinymce/plugins/autosave/langs/sv.js
rm js/tinymce/plugins/inlinepopups/editor_plugin_src.js
rm js/tinymce/plugins/inlinepopups/readme.txt
rm js/tinymce/themes/advanced/editor_template_src.js
cd ../wp-admin
rm edit-form-ajax-cat.php
rm execute-pings.php
rm inline-uploading.php
rm link-categories.php
rm list-manipulation.js
rm list-manipulation.php


Basically everything should be working up to this point. Click around and see if everything is working.

Next is to activate the plugins. Depending what plugins and the number of plugins you used, this can be a more problematic and time consuming part of the upgrade. I will follow up with another post on this.

Test out the site for a few days before moving on to your next blog.

Oh, and of course I’m going to update the AdAdvantage K2 scheme to work with 2.1.

Today I took a little time to explore around WordPress and found 2 little links so useful that I could not imagine how much time I had wasted without them!

Respective, go to the Add Link and Write Post page in the admin. Go right to the bottom of the page. You will see 2 links like the following.

The instructions are very clear so I will just summerise,

• click+drag the links to the bookmarks
• go to a page that you want to link ot blog about
• click on the booked link
• presto!

Try it!

This experience just goes to show that we have to take some time to sharpen our saw and not keep sawing with a blunt saw.