Given the feature list for WordPress 2.3 and the very strong warnings that came with every pre-release, I figured I should actually test this upgrade before going live.
So I did my usual process of importing the tarball into my bzr branch of mainline and merging with my customised perkypants.org branch (I really ought to document this some time — using bzr is such a massive time-saver!), but this time I did a trial upgrade on my local web server instead of pushing directly to the production site.
I ran the database upgrade script. Uneventful.
The category page included a conversion tool to switch categories to tags. I’ve been using categories as if they were tags for a while now, so I converted a whole bunch. Uneventful.
All my plugins were compatible, though I removed one in favour of the internal canonical permalinks support. Uneventful.
At this point I decided to push to the production server and migrate the other WordPress sites I administer, Pia’s blog and the Liberty Theatre blog. Uneventful.
So, does this mean I regard the WordPress 2.3 release as uneventful?
No way, it’s totally sweet! Another great incremental release with lots of under-the-bonnet improvements. I particularly like the Atom feed and publishing support (though I do wish the WP hackers would bite the bullet and switch to Atom by default — I like Internet standards more than Internet soap operas).
But the upgrade was blissfully uneventful. 
Thanks again, WordPress hackers!
7 Comments
Out of interest Jeff, which version did you migrate *from* ?
I’m still running 2.0.x (not had time to look at upgrading further)..
cheers!
Chris
Chris, I upgraded from WordPress 2.2.3. Using bzr branches means I can keep up-to-date without a lot of effort at all, despite maintaining three separate WordPress blogs.
I’m interested to know how you get the new tarball into bzr: do you just import into a completely new branch then force a ‘pull’ from the new one into your custom branch, or do you merge it into an existing one? How does it handle old files removed in the new tarball? It would be great if you had time to document this process.
I’ve been maintaining my site int bzr for a while but I made the mistake of importing my whole site with my wordpress installation nested (by-product of Subversion familiarity), which has prevented me tracking wordpress upstream with bzr-svn and merging across. So instead I’ve been using a manual process with Meld (nice tool).
If the way you’re working is as easy as you make it sound then I’m seriously tempted to reorganise things.
Cheers
Yes, please do document your bzr method of managing WordPress. I am very interested, and have been dying to find out ever since you mentioned it on that blog post you wrote about the Tango smilies.
Oh, and you only maintain three WordPress blogs? Man, you have it easy.
Unfortunately my blog upgrade was *not* uneventful and it took me half the day to rebuild from the pieces. Glad you had better luck.
Jeremy. well, in addition to the 90 or so on blogs.gnome.org, but they’re WPMU, so don’t count for the purposes of multiple-WordPress-maintenance brain damage.
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[…] to a new version, mainly because of the number of bugs that pop up in the weblog software. However, Jeff Waugh has documented his upgrade of Wordpress to version 2.3 and did not fiind any problems. I will give […]