How much did that upgrade suck?

by dimikagi

Some folks have asked why there’s been no post up for over a month, and it had everything to do with WordPress.

After my last post, I upgraded to WordPress 2.9 – and that’s when all the trouble started.  Basically, I couldn’t log in.  I could get to the database, and I could get to the file system, but actually logging in gave me a message that I didn’t have rights to log in.  So my password was good, but everything else was a no-go.  I had been using Fantastico, which is great until it isn’t.  Fantastico is basically a management tool that automates deploying things like drupal, WordPress and other web apps out that my hosting provider uses.  It makes new app deployments much easier than even the built-in ones.  For example, with WordPress, it will create the DB, and set up your first user.

But I think its the fact that I deployed with Fantastico, and then upgraded inside WordPress that caused these problems.  And after lots of googling, searching, and experimenting, I gave up.  I actually needed to move the site to the main address (www.idmwizard.com instead of blog.idmwizard.com) for a while, and this gave me a swift kick in the backside.  Of course,

For those of you stuck with an upgrade, here’s what I did.  First, I deployed a very, very bare bones WordPress to the core site.  Which means I deleted everything in the root directory (except for .htaccess) and then put the default WordPress out there.  I then created the database, and edited wp-config.php.  Once that was done, I went through the default install (found at /wp-admin/install.php) and specified my new admin user.  Once WordPress did its thing, I came through, copied my original files (from the blog.idmwizard.com site) over the ones in the root for www.

Now, here comes the tricky steps – I dropped all but 2 tables in the wordpress database.  The tables I left were wp_users and wp_usermeta.  This would let me log in but then I could bring everything else over.  Next, I exported out my old database, and then edited the SQL file.  The edits I made were:

  1. swap the order of the inserts for wp_users and wp_usermeta.  These two tables are linked, and trying to insert into wp_usermeta before the users themselves were updated would cause errors.
  2. Remove any entries for user #1 in both tables – this was the main user, and the one I could not log in with, so I wanted to make sure it didn’t get screwed up again.

After that, I imported the database into its new place, and that was it.  It looks like we’re back to where we started (almost).  There are still things that are screwed up – I see my tags are missing from all my posts, as well as the categories.  I’ll need to sort that out later.  But the core site works, and I should probably re-tag everything anyway.

That is all . . . glad I finally got this done, and I’m going to bed . . .

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