Upgrading to WordPress 2.5.1

Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 05:41pm

For quite some time my preference has been to wait until the first maintenance release of something before using it. I have found that being an early adopter for something that I just want to use can be extra work, even if it is just having to upgrade again the to maintenance release.

Once I heard that there would be native tag support in WordPress 2.3 I wanted to upgrade to that, but the talk of what would be available in WordPress 2.5 made me want to wait for that. Two weeks ago when 2.5.1 came out I knew it was time to start looking into upgrading.

Last weekend I jumped in and upgraded ride-extravaganza.com, where I am using WordPress as a publishing system, to 2.5.1. This was reasonably straightforward as I, when setting it up at the start of the year, kept my customisations within the theme and plugins. As with all changes I tested it out first on my local server before performing the change on the live sites.

Based on this success I started looking into upgrading this site. Because I was using the now redundant Ultimate Tag Warrior and had made some non standard customisations I expected it to be more work.

And it was.

After some research and experimentation during the week I was ready to upgrade the live site this afternoon. Which, as you are reading this, was successful.

So what did I do?

  • Update the WordPress files (and remove ones that are no longer needed).
  • Update FeedSmith, Markdown, Subscribe to Comments and WP-Cache to the latest versions.
  • Clean up my own plugin to link to other posts (heavily based on Easy Post-to-Post Links).
  • Export live database and import into local server (changing two options to have local hostname).
  • Run the upgrade script.
  • Import the tags from UltimateTagWarrior through admin interface.
  • Replace UTW_* calls in my theme to equivalent core functions. (I did briefly try out the UTW Theme Compatibility Thing plugin but decided against it)
  • Double check all settings
  • Test.
  • Test.
  • Upload files to live server.
  • Run the upgrade script.
  • Import the tags from UltimateTagWarrior through admin interface.
  • Double check all settings
  • Test.

Which brings us to now and I am happy with the upgrade and can move onto something else in my long list. One of which is running more of this site through WordPress instead of the current mix of WordPress, static files and the custom code for my computer collection.

Tagged with: , ,