Sometimes things are more complicated than they need to be.  Like Macbook Pros running OSx Leopard.  You’d think that the “common man’s” laptop that’s supposedly for the “artist-driven” and “creative” folk would make some sense.  But everywhere I turn, things are just plain confusing.  

More on that later.

This post marks my 1000th post.  I just upgraded to WordPress 2.7 a few moments ago after writing up the following.  After fixing some plugin issues (a few caused my admin page to give server errors), I came back to edit my post and noticed I had 999 posts.

1000 posts is pretty big.  I wonder if I should give something away.  Then again, I’ve given some things away on past entries that I still haven’t finished delivering (but I will, I promise!).  So maybe the upgrade to 2.7 is my own gift to myself.

This post is about my convoluted WordPress upgrade.  Wordpress is what I use to run my blog.  I’ve been on WordPress for a while now (3.5 years) and have been through a fair share of upgrades.  I’m also pretty geeky – I can do lots of stuff from the command line and know WordPress well enough.  I’ve upgraded other blogs to the latest WordPress 2.7 without a problem, and usually in less than 5 minutes.

But I have a little problem, as I’ve mentioned before.  With all these upgrades I’ve done over the years, there’s something amiss with the blog.  Specifically, the database has issues.  Anytime I try to do a backup of my blog with the tried-and-true WP-DB-Backup plugin, it fails (stuck at wp_options, and the page doesn’t refresh itself).  

Here’s how stupid it is – this backup hasn’t worked for over a year now.  So, what happens when I go and re-try it again just now, just so I can get a screenshot?

Go ahead, guess.  YUP.  The stupid thing actually WORKS.  So now I have a good backup.  SHEESH.

The other problem I constantly had was when I try to use the built-in Export function of WordPress, it fails as well (server error 500).  Maybe I’ll be lucky and it’ll work this time.

Nope.  Well at least half of my complaints are still valid.

Anyway.  Where was I?  Oh yeah, failures.  Ok, so now I have a backup.  I like having more than one backup, so I also want to do a MySQL backup *and* a filesystem backup.  I’m putting those in the extended entry below for those of you who’d like to know how to do that.

Now that those two things are done (see the extended entry for additional info), I need to download the latest 2.7 upgrade.  I keep all my plugins, themes, and code in my ~/src directory.

(uiserver):whall:~/src/wordpress > wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip
--14:20:41--  http://wordpress.org/latest.zip
          => `latest.zip'
Resolving wordpress.org... 72.233.56.139, 72.233.56.138
Connecting to wordpress.org|72.233.56.139|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: unspecified [application/zip]
    [  <=>        ] 1,849,558      4.80M/s
14:20:42 (4.79 MB/s) - `latest.zip' saved [1849558]
(uiserver):whall:~/src/wordpress > mv latest.zip latest-27.zip

I also like having the multiple versions around, so I move latest.zip to latest-27.zip.

The next thing to do is double-check and triple-check the Upgrading WordPress guide.  Here’s what I did with this upgrade:

1. Verified my backups
2. Did more backups
3. Said a little prayer for my backups
4. Downloaded the latest wordpress files (above)
5. Deactivated plugins

(uiserver):whall:~ > unzip ~/src/wordpress/latest-27.zip

(uiserver):whall:~ > cd blog
(uiserver):whall:~/blog > \rm -rf wp-includes/ wp-admin/

(uiserver):whall:~/blog > cd ../wordpress
(uiserver):whall:~/wordpress > tar cvf - . | (cd ../blog; tar xfBp -)

How to do a MySQL Backup from PHPMyAdmin at 1&1

I use 1&1 for my hosting.  They provide pretty decent admin tools through their console, and one of the tools is PHPMyAdmin.

I just click on phpMyadmin and it launches the console tool for managing MySql.

Once you get there, there’s an “export” button that really means “backup”

On the next page, select the database you want to back up, leave it as “SQL” for the type of backup, and click “Go” and you’ll get a backup file.  I presonally prefer my backup files to be zipped or gzipped, which is another option given.

How do to files backup of your blog directory

The essential parts of your blog are stored in the database – items such as posts, users, comments, categories, tags, options, etc.  However the actual code for the blog and your images are stored on the filesystem of whatever server you’re running on.

Every time I do an upgrade, I make ABSOLUTELY sure I back up my blog directory.  I use SSH to gain shell access to my server and use my friend tar() to do a good backup.  It’s a lot better than copy or anything else because it preserves structure, permissions, and ownerships of all the files.

So, let’s say I keep my blog in ~/blog (which I do).  I create a backup directory in the parent directory of the blog directory.

(uiserver):whall:~ > mkdir backup-of-blog

then I go into the real production directory and run the following command.  Make special notes of the options given – if you mess these up, you could really screw up things on your server.  

(uiserver):whall:~ > cd blog
(uiserver):whall:~/blog > tar cvf - . | (cd ../backup-of-blog/; tar xfBp -)

then it will start copying all your files and making a complete backup of the entire directory, including permissions, modes and everything.