Upgrade Hell
Every now and then I get the urge to check the most current versions of WordPress and Gallery and upgrade my blog. A few days ago, I found that I had actually missed one of the upgrade cycles for WordPress. The new version 2.3 has been out for a month and I never realised it. I decided to do an upgrade and though I normally follow all the necessary precautions like backups etc, there was something that I had forgotten to do. In a hurry to upgrade I forgot to deactivate all the plugins. I started the upgrade process and could not stop it, and was worried about what may happen. Fortunately, WordPress is very well behaved in its upgrades. The change was smooth, once all the files were copied over, it just smoothly came back into operations.
So where did the “hell” come from?
Well, one of the new features in WordPress 2.3 is the update notification on all plugins installed. So when you go to the plugins page, under each plugin, a notification would appear if there was a new version. That looked kind of neat, so I checked on the status of my gallery plugin and sure enough there was an update available. I quickly downloaded, deactivated and installed the plugin. I may not have followed all the instructions correctly, cause some things did not work as advertised.
I began checking things out slowly and also found that the gallery engine had not been upgraded for a while, so I decided to do that one first and then get back on track with the plugin.
Hoo boy! was that a nightmare, between file permissions, disk quotas, backups being erased and all the other fun one could have, my gallery was gone. Took a good part of the morning to restore the gallery and then upgrade it.
Finally, got it all working now.
Warning: Don’t start an upgrade without enough time on your hands and a LARGE cup of coffee.
Glad things are back to normal
. How about having a staging server if possible ?
I used to stage on my notebook, I guess I should start that again. Only issue is now that the gallery online is getting to be large.
Cheers…Kishore
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It must have been some rollercoster ride doing this upgrade. I did the similar excercise when I was builing Incredible India@60 blog (http://www.indiaat60.in/blog/). When I was setting it up, I downloaded the old version but just one day before the launch I installed 2.2.2 version and tried to test it on the server. I did not read the instructions as I did not have the time to do it, a mistake I know. But fortunately, I did not have any plugins so everything ran smooth and it was good but I do remember that I did not breathe for some time when the installation was happening..!