Upgrading Your Self-Hosted Wordpress Site

This past weekend I finally got around to upgrading an older Wordpress site (version 2.3) to the latest and greatest version 2.7.1.  Like most of you, who self-host your own Real Estate blog, I had dreaded doing this for fear of screwing it up, perhaps even inadvertently modifying post URLs and I envisioned search engines sending potential clients to the dreaded 404 page not found result.

Then I ran across a new Wordpress theme that I simply loved; Thesis by Chris Pearson. I had previously used his Cutline theme but Thesis is in an entirely different class and so much better than his previous work. Needless to say the new theme was not compatible with the older version site, there in explains my decision to finally upgrade.

Anyway long story short, I mitigated my upgrade risk by taking a few simple steps that allowed me to have a complete back-out plan all along the way throughout the entire process. Here are the simple steps I took to ensure that if and when I screwed up, I could easily make a quick recovery.

1. Used phpMyAdmin in my control panel to export the blog’s mysql database
2. Used phpMyAdmin to import the exported database into a brand new database
3. Note if your database is very large you will likely have to use a mysql shell to dump the contents of your database instead of phpMyAdmin, in my case (~400 posts/pages) there was not a problem.
4. Now I had 2 identical databases on my server each with a different name (a clean backup)
5. The original blog just so happened to be in a subdirectory named ‘blog’ that was reachable directly via an addon domain name.
6. I added a new subdirectory and named it temporarily ‘newblog’, then uploaded the new Wordpress version per instructions into this directory and modified its configuration to match the addon domain, but here is the key, I configured it to connect it to the 2nd backup database not the original one.
7. I copied all of the uploaded images and other special content from the original blog directory tree to the newblog directiory. However I did not copy any of the plugins, as I was fearful that one or more of them would not be compatible with the new Wordpress version.
8. Now the big test: I renamed the ‘blog’ directory to ‘oldblog’ (this takes your blog offline so I did it in the middle of the night) and then renamed the ‘newblog’ directory to ‘blog’
9. Using a browser I then simply connected to the original Wordpress admin URL and received the appropriate response that my database needed upgrading. Clicking yes to upgrading the database resulted in success.
10. To maintain my original URLs I configured the Wordpress permalinks identically to the previous version and verified. All was well and I finished up the installation by re-installing applicable plugins and testing.
11. The main point here is I was lucky and the process went rather smoothly, however if anything had gone wrong all I had to do was rename the subdirectories back to the original names and then go sleep on my mistakes to return another day.

The Thesis theme allows a number of different formats, e.g., two column left-right, three column left-right-middle, sticky featured post, and magazine style teasers on the home page, all with a click of a few configuration options.

The theme also contains some of the best SEO features I have seen, such as separate Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords for each post and it separates these from the normal Wordpress title that simply becomes a header under the title. Or you can leave off the Thesis SEO options and publish normally.
 
I love the Magazine style, take a look at my one evening’s work @ Huntsville Alabama Real Estate and let me know what you think.
 

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