Updated to WordPress 1.5

Noticed anything strange here in journal? No? Good!

I just finalised updating to WordPress 1.5. The process was partially smooth, but as I had hacked the original WP and some plug-ins for better layout or additional features, I had to port those changes one by one.

The updating process (in case you’re interested) was the following:

1. Backup the whole database with mysqldump.
2. Edit the resulting file to change the database.
3. Create new database and provide enough rights to relevant MySQL users.
4. Pump the data in the backup to the new database.
5. Install WordPress 1.5 to some location.
6. Fix the config to point to the correct database.
7. Run upgrade script provided by WordPress.
8. Change the blog URL manually from the database. Without this fix, the admin pages would redirect to the old blog.

Now we have one running blog in the old location, seen by all visitors and another blog that is used to get things right before publishing.

1. Create new theme.
2. Copy layout files to the new theme and activate it.
3. See the results and compare to the old blog.
4. Fix an issue and go back to the previous step. Fortunately, I had marked my changes to the old source — it was relatively easy to grep them and then port them to the new code. Some changes were no longer needed, for example, the calendar has been fixed to work with Finnish weekday style.
5. Install plugins and activate them. Add own code to the Spaminator. Some ideas were already implemented, so only 2/3 had to be ported.
6. Change external files that use the blog database. Test them.
7. Copy comment form layout and functionality from the old code. Change the name of the wp-comments-post.php file.
8. Find a bug in Textile JavaScript and fix it.
9. Test that everything works.

The new blog is running as an exact replica of the old one. It was time for the switch.

1. Move image directory from old blog to new one.
2. Configure new blogs URLs to point to the correct location.
3. Rename old blog directory.
4. Rename new blog directory.
5. Test that everything is still okay.

Easy, isn’t it?

By the way — please inform me, if you find anything out of ordinary.