WordPress’s Latest Upgrade – Or My Morning With FTP
So today Matt Mullenweg released Wordpress 1.2.2 – and I had a chance to see if I could install it without a fight.
Short answer – yes. Long answer: take your time, go very slowly, backup everything, check and double check, and you’ll have no problems.
According to the documentation, a minor upgrade like this should be quick and simple to do. True, but I’m always looking for ways to complicate things, so I had to give it a try here as well.
The basic instructions are simple, just backup everything, delete everything, copy the new files over, and then copy back any files you’ve modified in the past. By keeping multiple FTP windows open, I was able to compare copy dates, and make sure I didn’t delete or overwrite any of my changed files. Tedious, but the result was only the unchanged files were replaced, with minimal impact.
But there was a problem with this plain vanilla solution - while I’m updating, my site is down. So instead, I set up alternate subfolders (wp-admin2, wp-images2, wp-content2, etc.), copied the new files over to them, and added any changed pages from my current site. As a final step, I copied over the newer ‘top level’ files (like index.php), and renamed the subdirectories, thereby swapping in my new update rather quickly.
Of course, it would have been easier to place my whole WordPress setup in a subdirectory, and then swap that single directory in, and I recommend that for any new installation. I didn’t for two reasons.
Firstly, because this site was a dedicated blog, a subdirectory seemed redundant. After all, why force people to type www.BigBizBlog.com/blog instead of just www.BigBizBlog.com? There’s nothing else here…
Secondly, I’m already listed in Google and Yahoo, and didn’t want to fiddle with these listings (or with my .htaccess file to handle redirecting).
So, do as I say, and not as I do – but I do recommend performing an upgrade, if only to get comfortable with the procedure. There may come a time when you’ll have to do it (like an emergency security update), so why not be prepared?
