Those Software Upgrade Blues

A short time ago WordPress released their biggest revision in a while, making the whole number leap to version 3.0. This posed a challenge to me. I know that they’ve been working to make WP more secure, so upgrading is important. To further complicate matters, a couple of new features I’d like to add here are only available once I upgrade. And then there’s the incessantly nagging “WordPress 3.0 is available! Please update now.” at the top of my editing window. On the other hand, only a fool installs the “dot-zero” release of anything.

Yeah, clothe me in motley. I went with the fool’s hand.

Needless to say, it didn’t go well, in spite of meticulously following the WordPress-given instructions. While the site still loaded — missing only some small features and cosmetic elements — the administrative interface decided to take a quick vacation to the islands, possibly to escape the heat. After a couple of hours trying the solutions suggested in various WordPress forums I threw in the towel and started the process of restoring the site from backups.

I may be a fool, but at least I know I’m a fool. Of course I have backups.

After a couple of hours’ delay as I waited for the nice people at hosting.com to restore my database we are back in business. Of course, accidents like this can leave scars, and this is not an exception. Now my old posts have been liberally peppered with arcane symbols* and characters. I’ve fixed up the most recent posts, but since WordPress doesn’t give me a convenient search-and-replace tool the remaining mistakes will have to wait for someone to bring them to my attention. It’s as annoying as all hell, but so it goes.

Some days, it feels as though I’d be better off going back to the days of hand-coding each story individually, and dumping content management software altogether. I may yet do it.

*I’m deliberately avoiding the technical terms to avoid scaring people away. If you’re a WP guru with a suggestion I’m all ears. Leave me a comment.