Upgrading WordPress from 2.1 to 2.3
I broke my WordPress instance last night by doing something stupid, then decided to make amends by updating to 2.3. I hadn’t done it because of the database conversion requirement which was introduced with 2.2. But with a broken web site at 1:00 a.m. I decided to fix it by upgrading. These are the steps, and the resources I used:
- backed up the database
- posted a downtime note
- converted the database to UTF-8
- upgraded to the latest version
Not so bad, really. In related news, I’m also using a trial copy of MarsEdit to write this post, and I’m really liking it. Intuitive, simple and clean. I’ve been using Textile a lot lately, so even just for this reason MarsEdit seems like a logical choice for writing to my blog (I’d been using TextWrangler and the WordPress TinyMCE).
Update: When I first posted the article MarsEdit sent it as plain text. Looks like I was only previewing in Textile. I’ve changed the blog settings, so hopefully this will do the trick.
Update 2: Daniel Jalkut enlightened me to the fact that MarsEdit doesn’t convert your syntax to HTML, it just sends what you type, so to be able to write in Textile on MarsEdit you’d need to enable a Textile plugin on your blog. (I tried it quickly, but it seems to misinterpret some of the syntax in my previous posts.) After exchanging a few e-mails with Daniel it’s clearer that the appeal of MarsEdit is the ease and speed of publishing to your blog that it provides, over the GUI that WordPress comes with. Unfortunately for me the XMLRPC requests are very slow, which could be related to my webhost.
I know your pain. I hate the metallic taste of panic when you realise that “it’s all gone, all my work is gone!”
Personally, I prefer to use good ol’ fashion html to do anything fancy. I do seem to use FCKEditor when I install a WYSIWYG editor. I’ve got it working a Rails web app and in Drupal 6 (neither is hard) – perhaps it is worth checking out as a free alternative.
March 15th, 2008 at 7:17 pm #
I hate the metallic taste of panic when you realise that “it’s all gone, all my work is gone!”
Actually, not far from what happened :-) I hadn’t backed up in a while, and had a different version of WordPress on localhost that I totally forgot about when I decided to synchonise them. Nice.
Re. FCKEditor, the Office 2003 skin is surprisingly accurate, though the grab ridges are decorative. Personally, I want to be able to use either Textile or Markdown when writing for the blog. But this could be very helpful for content editors that I work with since they wouldn’t have to bother with the wiki syntax.
March 15th, 2008 at 8:30 pm #
Thanks for giving MarsEdit a spin. As it sounds like you’ve discovered, MarsEdit more or less always just sends what you type into it. It doesn’t generate HTML from Textile, except for to preview.
Feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions during your trial.
Daniel
March 15th, 2008 at 9:06 pm #
Thanks Daniel, now it makes more sense. There are Textile plugins for WordPress so MarsEdit doesn’t need to convert what it sends to HTML… but I’m guessing that it could, and maybe that if it did it would make the blog archive’s content formatting more stable against future changes to Textile processing on the server-side? I’m not sure if this would be good for remote clients generally, but would maybe make the database contents more consistent.
March 16th, 2008 at 1:50 am #