Been dragging my feet on this task for while but I finally got around to upgrading my current 2.2.x WordPress installation to 2.3.1. Overall not a bad experience but there are a few things to watch out for during the process.

Avoid disaster and do diligence before upgrading

Before you jump into the upgrade, if you haven’t already, back up your blog data and make copies of your current theme. I used the basic WordPress export feature to make a quick copy of my content. Next I logged into my hosting providers FTP site and pulled down the complete folder of my current theme. As one final step of paranoia, I set up the current theme on my local WAMP server and imported all of my backed up content. Once that was complete, I accessed my local version of my site running on my WAMP server to double check I had a fully functioning local version of my site.

With my data and theme safe on my local machine, I did the following:

• Turned off all of my plug-ins
• Logged into my hosting provider and used the one-click upgrade to move from 2.2.x to 2.3.1
• Once my provider completed the upgrade, I logged into my WordPress site as admin which completed the final stage of the upgrade
• I logged in to my provider’s FTP site and uploaded my theme (customized version of Abstrakt3c by Kaushal Sheth)
• Went to my plug-in page and checked for updates to all of my installed plug-ins (nearly all of them had newer versions — glad I checked)
• I updated whatever plug-ins I could and then one by one activated them and checked my site after each activation

One gotcha - error wp_post2cat table does not exist

The one big gotcha came after I activated my Google Site Map Generator plug-in and tried to edit a post. I got a database error that said my wp_post2cat table did not exist. Even though I thought I updated all of my plug-ins, I missed the Google Site Map Generator — I was running version 2.7. Anything older than 3.0 can cause problems therefore I deactivated the plug-in, removed it from my plug-ins directory, and downloaded and activated the latest version of the plug-in — everything back to normal.

Still need to deal with Simple Tag plug-in

WordPress 2.3.1 comes with built in tagging support, which means I no longer need the Simple Tags plug-in. Unfortunately, Simple Tags uses a square bracket mechanism to mark tags in the body of a post. There is no easy import included for Simple Tags, and if I turn off the plug-in, I’m left with square brackets and the word “tag” all over my posts. For now I need to leave the plug-in activated but will work to clean up my older posts so I can remove the plug-in once and for all.

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Filed under: How-To & Tech Tips