Upgraded Wordpress

by Don Murray, P.Eng. 2005-03-10 One-minute read

Finally upgraded Wordpress to 1.5. It took a while to do because I decided to test it out first. The first step was to create a vhost in apache, exactly mimicking the settings for blog.coredump.ca. I added an internal DNS entry, so I could browse to “http://blogtest” from my internal network. Next I hacked together a very small shell script which did the following:

  1. mysqldump of wordpress db to wptest.sql
  2. create wptest db if not exists
  3. load wptest.sql into wptest db
  4. create entires in mysql.db for the wordpress user, allowing access to wptest as well as the production wordpress db
  5. change all instances of ‘blog.coredump.ca’ to ‘blogtest’ in the wp_options table

Now that the database was ready, I installed the new wordpress into the appropriate directory, as specified in my apache config. I copied wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php, then set it to use the test wordpress database and the appropriate wordpress user credentials. Once this was done, I could browse to ‘http://blogtest/wp-admin/upgrade.php’. Voila! A test of wordpress without impacting you, my dedicated readers! Wordpress worked flawlessly in my test environment. Corinna liked the new Kubrick theme better than the classic, so I proceeded to upgrade blog.coredump.ca. The only wrinkle: I forgot to disable permalinks before the upgrade. Once I corrected that, everything looked great.