Nigerian Entrepreneur

Praise God! I successfully upgraded at last. This morning, I decided to upgrade to WordPress 2.5.1 since I was advised by friends that it was necessary for security reason (that got me scared enough to change my prior decision. I do not want my blog hacked!).

Unfortunately, unlike my prior experience when upgrading from WordPress 2.3 to 2.5, the Automatic Upgrade Plug-in got stuck midway during the upgrading process ( I tried several time but got the same result). It gave the following error

“Could Not Initiate Maintenance Mode”

and then politely gave the following message

“Some problems did not allow us to upgrade your blog. You can email me the logs so that I can help debug your problem……”

That was it. I panicked and started Googling up and down to find possible solution to the error. Well, nothing positive turned up (it could be that I was entering wrong information into Google anyway, I was too tensed up). After wasting about 1hour 30minutes, I told myself it is time to try the manual upgrading that I have been dodging from. So I went back to wordpress.org and also read some posts by other bloggers on how to upgrade manually.

Eventually, I followed the following steps to upgrade manually.

1. I backed up my WP blog database and downloaded the backup to my desktop.
2. I backed up the following folders – wp-admin, wp-content and wp-includes ( I learned those are the essential folders that make WordPress tick.)
3. I deactivated all plugins and activated Maintenance Mode Plugin (did you visit while it was up? I am sorry it stayed for more than 60minutes that I promised. I was battling under the hood all that while.)
4. I uploaded the new WordPress 2.5.1 into a folder on my server (it was painfully slow, took about 60minutes because of my slow Internet Connection).
5. I deleted Folder wp-admin and its entire content and copied the new wp-admin from the WordPress 2.5.1 into its postion.
6. I deleted Folder wp-includes and its entire contents and copied the new wp-includes form WordPress 2.5.1 into its position.
7. I transferred index-php file from the new WordPress 2.5.1 to overwrite the old one in Folder wp-content.
8. I exited Smart FTP (the free FTP transfer software that I use).

That was supposed to be all. But guess what, when I entered my blog address into the browser, I was greeted with the Maintenance Mode message. Well, I knew I had to log in as admin and deactivate the plug-in. Unfortunately, when I tried to log in from the Maintenance Mode Page, it did not work. I almost panicked again. But then I remembered that I could log in from WordPress direct. So I tried that and I was told that my Database needed to be upgraded, I agreed to the upgrade and voila, the upgrade is successful 😉 .

I logged in successfully and reactivated my plug-ins. So far, everything is working fine. The whole affairs took over 3hours. Ignorance is quite expensive. Next time, I believe I will do better. I believe that I would have finished sooner if not for the fact that I was too tensed up because of fear. If you are yet to upgrade from WordPress 2.5, I encourage you to do so! Cheers.

Tags: Blogging, Ramblings, Wordpress

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 5:46 pm and is filed under Blogging, Ramblings, Wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.