Those of you who have been making use of the site over the last hour may have noticed that it has been displaying odd errors here and there, and at one stage was completely unusable. This is because I was upgrading the site from WordPress 1.5.2 to WordPress 2.0.
The process could have been quicker, but I decided to play it safe and go the full backup way. To do this I enabled the “site unavailable” plugin and disabled all others, and set about performing a full site backup and a full database backup. As I knew a site backup would be too large to download any time tonight I came up with a quicker way. I copied the /public_html directory to /wpbackup on the server (/public_html being the equivalent of http://samuelgordonstewart.com/ on the server) and then used the webhosting control panel to download a database backup (just over 500kb).
After this I disabled the “site unavailable” plugin (plugins need to be disabled during a wordpress upgrade) and then ran the automated updater, checked it didn’t break everything, which it didn’t, and enabled the plugins I had running previously. Thankfully WP2.0 seems to be pretty backward compatible with WP1.5.x
Among the new features in WP2.0
- A decent WYSIWYG post editor
- A major overhaul of the admin interface…I spend a fair bit of time here so it is nice to see a new look
- Inbuilt ability to import blogs from Blogger, Movable Type, Textpattern and any RSS feed (that would have saved me a lot of time and effort when I moved from blogger to WordPress in late August
- Upgrades to user management (still no ability to disable a user’s ability to leave comments though…must check the plugin repository again).
- A better file upload manager (I still prefer FTP though).
- A post preview which uses the layout of the blog to show me what the post will look like before I publish it. This is a fantastic improvement over the old version where the post preview was not formatted for the blog and was really just a very rough guide.
The really good news is that the theme I have spent a lot of time modifying to suit my needs is also compatible with WP2.0 (I think all 1.5.x themes are), which means I won’t have to spend time fixing that.
Well, I’m happy, and everything seems to be fine, I’ll keep the backups in place for a while just in case, but I would welcome any bug reports you may have. If you find a problem either leave a comment below or email by clicking on the contact link at the top of the page.
Samuel