In the previous post, I talked about all the reasons to upgrade to version 2.6.+. After doing a few and researching some issues I thought I may warn you of what you may be in for.
First and foremost is backing up your files and database. Believe me, this is critical because I needed it on all upgrades I performed. WordPress categories are not getting translated over in some instances and since I am still relatively “Geek Impaired” I had to manually add the categories back into the databases by hand. I researched this for quite some time and found no way import them into the database. So if anyone reading this knows how to do it please share it with us!
Then there is the automatic upgrade options and plugins, well it seems that certain settings need to be set on the server for access to the tmp folder. If you don’t have access to or know how to make these changes then you are stuck with the same old manual upgrade process. I found that setting the file permissions to 777 on the entire blog or site may work to use these options but then you need to go back and secure your blog and change all the file permissions back. By the time I did all that I could have upgraded everything five times! Oh, and one of my blogs got hacked in the short time I changed the settings to 777 throwing all kinds of porn links on a few posts. I noticed the site really crawling and then started seeing the porn posting and, oh hell it was a mess…
If you were or are using Ultimate Tag Warrior on WordPress prior to version 2.5 good news so far. With the import option, Manage, Import, Ultimate Tag Warrior in the dashboard, bringing back your tags and the post relationships was a snap. I wish there was a category option in there too! Well, there is a WordPress import but I didn’t want to add duplicate content or know if it would recognize the old categories and convert them.
Some of the smaller blogs I upgraded for clients have been easier so far simply because they had only a few plugins and categories on them. But my other site took me a while to upgrade simply because it had a lot of plugin compatibility issues and way too many categories to manually add back.
All in all, I guess it isn’t all that bad but if you are a complete newbie or very Geek Impaired I suggest you do your homework first or get some help!
If anyone can shed some light on the several issues I encountered on here feel free to comment or contact me if you want to make a guest post here with the fix.