Okay, so anyone who’s ever worked with me, listened to me talk about work, or just stood next to me when there’s a decision to be made will know that I’m not the sort of person who usually Reads The Fine Manual when it comes to a lot of things. I tend to just sorta pile on into whatever’s the new toy, and see what happens…
Well, last night, I tried that with WordPress 2.0 (the software that displays my blog on my home site)
So let’s just itemize what I did to myself, shall we?:
- Ignored the stuff where they tell you to completely back up your database (let me get to that in a minute).
- Ignored the bit about disabling all plugins
- Ignored the stuff where they tell you to remove all files
- and just clobbered my old install with the 2.0 install
and then ran the upgrade.
Hilarity ensued, let me ensure you.
Including, but not limited to, a 30-minute ABSPATH hunt (the location of the web site in general, meaning once the upgrade was completed, there was now way for the blog to find it’s own files).
…and I totally did it to myself.
Got it all back in this morning (thank goodness for ChefBoyArdee PHPMyAdmin)
I managed to backup my (very sadly broken) database, and then copy/paste the parts I needed (liked the settings, options, POSTS! and comments). The really scary thing was that any large paste (of maybe 15 posts at a time) would cause a connection reset in PhpMyAdmin (at least, under Firefox browser).
One thing that was sorta scary (and I should keep in mind if I’m stupid brave enough to try that at any point in the future):
I’ve got two plugins installed: WP-StatTraq (for statistics and inbounding linking information) and WPHashCash (for anti-comment-spam, so please comment on this at my Home Blog and see if everything’s still working).
I *think* the combination of these two plugins, and their nature of storing data into the database (which means every visit I get to the site gets an entry into the database, and every comment attempt also goes in, I think), lead to a much larger database file (once exported) than I would normally have had. Subsequently, when I tried to import the exported file back into the DB, it choked at the 5minute mark (300second timeout during a single request).
But usually, I’m really lucky and happy with WordPress (and again, it was not WP’s fault, it’s totally MINE).
So yeah. I’m going to get the new server going, first and foremost, and quit goofing around with the blog for a bit. I’ll still post (I hope) during January, but this whole migration from Server 2000 to Server 2003 (and Exchange 2000 to Exchange 2003) has been kicking my butt for months now…
Oh, and Happy New Year everyone. I’ll do a proper “State of the Union” type post in the next few days.
