update #1 September 6, 2006 .. // see end of this post
update #2 December 3, 2006 .. // see end of this post

PRELUDE

The first blog that I created is the PetLvr.com/blog/ … It was created (if memory serves me correctly, on version 1.12 of WordPress. I have updated it three times in the past … first to the next version 1.13 and then the more stable version 1.5. It was upgraded after a few bugs were fixed to the version 1.5.2 and has been this version since summer of 2005.

Well, as with all new blogs that I am adding to our HART-Empire Network .. I will have created them with the newest version 2 software. The latest version is now 2.0.4.

I’ve been meaning to upgrade blogs as I go along – and have been doing so in the past summer 2006 – but I’ve been dreading upgrading the PetLvr blog for two basic reasons:

* According to the upgrade page …

The latest version, WordPress 2.0.4 (wordpress.org/development/2006/07/wordpress-204/), has been released to the public. If you just need to upgrade from WordPress 2.0.3 to 2.0.4, a special instruction section, Upgrade 2.0.3 to 2.0.4, is presented below. For other upgrade paths, such as 1.5.2 to 2.0.3 or 2.0 or 2.0.1 to 2.0.3, please see the Detailed Instructions or How to Upgrade in Five Steps.

* I have a lot of plugins! You can see the original list BEFORE upgrade .. HERE

PetLvr blog is the one with most traffic, although mostly from search engines .. and has the most feedburner subscribers. Most of my monetization techniques with Adsense is received from this blog – although, it is not much. Nevertheless .. when I finally got around to upgrading this blog .. I did not want to risk ruining my database and blog and starting from scratch.

Despite the above blockquote .. where it appears that you are not able to upgrade from 1.5.2 directly to 2.0.4 and have to go to 2.0.3 first – then upgrade from 2.0.3 to 2.0.4 … I’m here to say it IS possible, and I have finally upgraded my PetLvr blog today. It was not a perfect upgrade, because I lost 4 plugins and my bookmarklet script from 1.5.2 does NOT work with 2.0.4. I’ve been meaning to test out other options and even have programs like BlogDesk installed .. but that will be a post for another day.

STEP ONE: BACK UP ALL THE FILES ON MY SERVER

By far, this is the longest task to do .. because with my PetLvr blog .. I have almost 1700 posts and tons of pictures. It literally took me 2-1/2 hours to copy via FTP all of the files on my server .. PetLvr.com/blog/*.* to my local drive. As with all my other domains – I keep a copy of all the files on my hard drive to mirror what is on the internet. On my computer, I keep a folder called PETLVR.com and I’ve got everything on my computer that is on the internet server. I make FTP Backups every Friday of all my domains .. although whenever I do any template modifications I make a backup folder of the current template files “just in case” my modifications do not work out.

I made it a point to be sure that I FTP’ed over my .htaccess file in the root folder to my harddrive, and even made a backup copy and renamed it 20060828.htaccess.copy.

STEP TWO: BACKUP THE ACTUAL BLOG DATABASE and/or MySQL DATA

I used to do this religiously every Friday, with the FTP’ing of my files over to my hard drive .. but as more and more blogs were created .. this became quite a challenge to make the time to do a full backup. Thanks to Skippy .. my backups are all made daily now on every blog. Here’s how to do it:

1) You should get a GMAIL.com email account (they give you lots of space!)
2) Go to Skippy’s Plugin Page and get the following WordPress Plugins:
* WP-DB-Backup and WP-Cron
3) Schedule a full backup of all your tables daily to your GMAIL account in the middle of the night!

Today, I made two extra precautionery backups of MySQL Database … because of the importance of the PetLvr blog to me, and the uncertainty of waiting too long between version 1.5.2 and 2.0.4 to finally upgrade. First, I used the WordPress plugin by Skippy to make a backup “right now” .. and then I went directly into my cPanel and phpMyAdmin and database and made a backup copy manually that way. If you don’t know how to do that .. perhaps you might want to check out an older post on my other blog that documented a move between two host providers that I did … HERE.

>> Don’t underestimate the importance of backups – things CAN go wrong and you just never know! Make the Backups.

STEP THREE – PRINT AND CHECK OUT MY CURRENT PLUGINS PAGE

I felt it important to print out, from my browser (File/Print/) a clean list of all plugins that I currently had installed and activated BEFORE I do any upgrading (From Dashboard/Plugins/). I had about 25 more plugins that had been deactivated than I actually had activated ..which was 49. I will delete them some day from my /wp-content/plugins/ folder one day. But for now, I just crossed off all the ones that were NOT activated.

I then went to the WordPress Plugin Compatibility page and checked every single plugin .. first to see which ones were NOT compatible. On my printout, I hilited those with a blue hiliter .. to remind me NOT to reactivate them – for now.

Also, on the wordpress page, it tells you the minimum version number of each plugin that is required for the wordpress 2.0 upgrades .. and when that differed from my printout, I went to each page and downloaded a NEW version .. which I keep in a folder called .. /INSTALLEDPROGRAMS/WORDPRESS/PLUGINS/. I create new subfolders with the version number included in the folder name for reference. As I mentioned on my PetLvr.com blog and earlier .. it turned out that 4 plugins were not compatible, I had 25 useless plugins that I tried and decided not to use anymore, and I had to upgrade 18 plugins to the latest versions.

I should note, that not all plugins were listed on the above page inside wordpress. For those plugins, I hilited them on my printout with my yellow hiliter and put a question mark (?) next to it.

STEP FOUR: I GAVE NOTICE TO MY BLOG THAT I WAS UPGRADING

I know from my Bloglines .. that even if your site is down, my RSS feeds through Feedburner will get through to my readers. So, ?I decided that I would make a “heads up” post and warning to let my readers know that I was planning an upgrade, and just in case there was a problem – not to panic.

I also posted an entry to let them know that I was done .. as a courtesy.

STEP FIVE: DEACTIVATE AND UPGRADE ALL THE PLUGINS

In my Dashboard of my blog, in the Plugins page .. I went down the list and deactivated every single plugin. By the way .. that took time too, as I had 49 activated, and it takes time to deactivate and reload that page. I had a few extra tabs and windows open in both Internet Explorer and Firefox, and was hitting Refresh after each time I deactivated a plugin (while I was reloading) to see if something of the plugin affects my site. The answer is obviously yes .. even if you deactivate the Wp-Admin-Bar2 plugin .. it hangs up the page because of the code in the header. The translation plugin deactivated halted my entire sidebar. I was finally doing this! I had to hurry.

I went into my FTP program and copied over all the newer versions of the 18 plugins that I needed to upgrade. I basically just overwrote the old files. While I was doing this, I would glance over the Readme.Txt files included – just in case there were special requirements. For instance, some plugins require that you place files in folders other than the main /wp-content/plugins/ folder.

STEP SIX: COPY OF THE WORDPRESS VERSION 2.0.4 FILES TO MY SERVER

I already had the version 2.0.4 of wordpress in my /INSTALLEDPROGRAMS/WORDPRESS/2.0.4/wordpress/ folder on my computer, and I FTP’ed that entire folder onto my server directly to the proper location at PetLvr.com/blog/. I did NOT delete any files on my server, and just overwrote all existing files of the new version over the older version.

When that was done, while in my FTP program, I copied over my WP-CONFIG.PHP in my root wordpress directly from my mirror backup (step one) at c:\PETLVR.COM\blog\ over the existing one on the server. Actually, this wasn’t really necessary, because there is no WP-CONFIG.PHP file on any of the latest download versions of wordpress .. because it’s included as a file called WP-CONFIG-SAMPLE.PHP. I just did that for peace of mind really.

STEP SEVEN: USE THE UPGRADE SCRIPT AND F5 TO REFRESH

After all of the files were copied over, I went to the upgrade link that every blog has .. mine being PetLvr.com/blog/wp-admin/upgrade.php … and ran the script. Afterwards, I hit F5 to refresh my pages.

Also, out of habit, in my FTP program, afterwards I rename my upgrade.php file to .. well, I’m not going to tell you what I rename it .. so nobody can go and upgrade my blog besides me! Although, I think if it’s the same version – nothing should happen. It’s just a piece of mind thing for me again.

STEP EIGHT: START ACTIVATING THE PLUGINS!

Naturally, I ignored all of the blue hilited plugins on my printout, because they were just incompatable. That left the yellow hilited plugins on my list (unconfirmed if they would work or not) and the rest of the activated plugins. I just started from the top of the page and started to activate all of the non-hilighted plugins.

After those were hilighted, I was lucky – because when I hit refresh on my pages – I saw my blog. I was worried that there might be some code embedded somewhere on my templates that associated with the yellow hilited plugins that I was unsure, and would halt my view.

So, after that .. I just activated all the yellow hilited plugins. I did this one at a time, refreshing the pages and seeing if something happened (actually to see if something DIDN’T happen, like loading the pages) .. until all the plugins were activated.

I then went into my dashboard for both my MANAGE and OPTIONS menues, and double checked that the information was properly formatted and configured correctly. Thankfully, most everything carried forward from the version 1.5.2 into the version 2.0.4 except for 2 plugins that were completely re-written for the new 2.0+ version.

STEP NINE: CHECK OUT THE BLOG

Just hitting refresh on the main page is not enough to see if everything works – you have to click on stuff. For instance, as soon as I first clicked on the last permalink aka blog entry .. that I noticed that I forgot to go into my OPTIONS/PERMALINKS and reset those automatically through the wordpress. So, I upgraded my permalinks. Then, I started to click on permalinks. I started to click on EDIT links. I started to click on COMMENT links. I even tested a comment just to be sure.

Now, everything seems to work – although, I did notice some formatting that I need to take care, or twiddle dee my CSS file .. but, I’m comfortable to leave that “AS IS” until I get around to this.

I was quite disappointed that my Bookmarklet doesn’t work anymore. I actually used this alot on all my blogs. On any page or URL around the internet, all I had to do in Internet Explorer was right click and select “Post to WP: PetLvr Blog” .. and a new page with the title, description, code to link to the particular page and all of the categories popped up – so I could write my blog entry. When I click the “OK”, it sent the post as a DRAFT into my PetLvr blog itself to be posted later when I got around to it. Now, with this new version, it doesn’t work at all.

STEP TEN: ONCE I WAS COMFORTABLE MY BLOG WORKED – I POSTED A MESSAGE TO MY READERS

I gave a courtesy post to let everybody know that I was finished, but just in case – asked for reader assistance to help me and to email me if they found anything unusual after my upgrade. You just never know.

Of course, This is how I did it – and it worked directly from 1.5.2. to version 2.0.4. Had something not worked, my process would have been to just delete everything from the server, and start with a fresh installation of the new version, copy over my wp-config files and all the pictures and themes and plugins, and put everything back. And, if that didn’t worked … I would have just went over to the wordpress support forums and do a little more research and not sleep for a few days until it was fixed!

UPDATE: SEPTEMBER 6, 2006 …

It turned out today that my RSS Feed was NOT working – and has not been working since I upgraded to version 2.0.4 on August 28, 2006. From what I can tell .. there is a 95% chance the cause of this was because I upgraded to the OL-FEEDBURNER plugin version 2.01 that was supposed to work for wordpress 2.0+ versions. I noticed today that there were bugs in this version and a version 2.02 was available. After upgrading the plugin version, my RSS Feed became clear and worked again. I’m not sure if this was the REAL reason – but, it would seem so. I could be 5% wrong :p

UPDATE: DECEMBER 3, 2006 …

I have successfully updated my 1800HART blog directly from version 1.5.2 to the latest version 2.0.5. There was one casualty .. I have lost my data for my DEMOCRACY poll and results. Oh well. I would suggest that if you have this – take a snapshot picture to remember what the results were PRIOR to upgrade and deactivate/activate the plugin. It could be that my plugin needed to be completely upgraded – previously using version 1.2 and upgrading to version 2.0.1