Upgraded to WordPress 2.0.2

I finally got enough time to upgrade Nomadig.com journal to the latest version of WordPress. The transition was soothingly smooth — these guys seem to know what they are doing — as there were not even minor hiccups.

To serve my readers, I decided duplicate the WP installation and upgrade the duplicate. After I found the duplicate working well, I switched the blogs.

The process required also duplicating the database, as otherwise the production blog would have gone haywire.

Follow these easy steps to upgrade from WP 1.5 to 2.0.2 with a duplicate settings.

1. Make a copy of the WP directory, for example, cp -a journal journal2.
2. Dump MySQL database to a file, mysqldump -u user -ppassword –opt database > ~/wp_backup.sql.
3. Create new MySQL database.
4. Add use new_database; in the beginning of the dumped file.
5. Upload the edited dump to MySQL mysql -u user -ppassword < ~/wp_backup.sql.
6. Change the blog and WP admin URLs in the new database to refer to the new WP directory. I used phpMyAdmin to find the rows and edit them.
7. Edit wp-config.php file in the new WP directory to refer to the correct database.
8. Edit .htaccess in the same directory to use correct rewrite URLs.
9. Test that you can view and log in the new WP installation.
10. Upgrade WP as instructed in codex.wordpress.org.
11. Test everything.
12. Change the blog and WP admin URLs in the new database to refer to the old WP directory.
13. Dump the new database to file, mysqldump -u user -ppassword –opt new_database > ~/wp_2_backup.sql.
14. Add use database; (the old database name) in the beginning of the dumped file.
15. Edit wp-config.php to refer back to the old database.
16. Edit .htaccess to use correct rewrite URLs.
17. Upload the version 2 db over the old database, mysql -u user -ppassword < ~/wp_2_backup.sql.
18. Rename the old WP directory, mv journal journal_old.
19. Rename the new WP directory, mv journal2 journal.
20. Test that everything still works.
21. Write an entry about the upgrade. Remember to be specific.