Bharat S. M. Karavadra

Upgrading from WordPress 2.65 to 2.7

Sunday, December 14th, 2008

After the recent release of WordPress 2.7, the next major release of the WordPress publishing system, I just found time to upgrade this site’s blog to 2.7.

After reading the WordPress support articles, compatibility lists and support forums, I thought the process would have taken a few hours considering the number of WordPress plug-ins that I use on this site’s blog.

But it took me about an hour (with a few cups of tea in between), and now I will tell you about my experience of the upgrade progress and how I think you should approach the upgrade.

Be Up To Date
1) Make sure you have the latest 2.6.5 release of WordPress installed and working with the latest plug-ins because this was my starting point.

Back-up
2) Now backup your database either using a custom or hosted installation of phpMyAdmin or one of the database backup plug-ins for WordPress.

3) Download a copy via FTP of all your blog files. Simply download the WordPress blog directory in one go.

Now you have all the information that you need to re-install your current working version of WordPress just in case anything odd happens with the upgrade process.

Before You Upgrade
4) Check that all your latest plug-ins are compatible with WordPress 2.7. You can see the plugin compatibility list and any issues as this link. If you find incompatibilities then simply follow the instructions for upgrading to WordPress 2.7 for each plugin.

5) Check that your theme is compatible with WordPress 2.7 by again checking the compatibility list at this link and following any suggestions for upgrading your theme to WordPress 2.7

6) You can check any compatibility issues with your hosting provider at this link.

Once you know what need to do before or after upgrading WordPress 2.7 and considering any compatibility issues  in points 4 to 6 above (if any at all), then you can start upgrading the process…

Upgrade
7) Download and copy all the WordPress 2.7 files over your existing installation on the server.

8) Go to your blog’s upgrade address in your browser (e.g. http://www.mysite.com/blog/wp-admin/upgrade.php)  and click the button to upgrade the WordPress database.

That’s it for upgrading the files and database to get to version 2.7 of WordPress.

9) Login to your admin and check your plug-ins again to see if any of them need an upgrade and if so upgrade them.

10) Following any instructions you noted from the compatibility lists for plug-ins, themes and host and that should be it.

My Upgrade Issues
Plug-ins WP-Email (emailing Posts to people) and WP-Print (printing Posts with custom page design) by Lester Chan had to be upgraded again after upgrading to WordPress 2.7. After installing these plug-ins I had to re-building the Permalinks in admin for the links to emailing and printing to work again.

The Manageable plugin by Aaron Harp (making it very easy to edit post details in the list of Posts view) had to be Deactivated and deleted as it is now built into WordPress 2.7

The custom logo used with the Register Plus plugin by Skullbit (which allows you to add extra and custom registration fields) had to be increased in size from 292 pixels wide to 300 pixels.

That’s it.

If you need any more information or support then please leave your feedback below.