… or Why I Love this Software

For the handful of you who have actually been reading my blog on occasion (hi Dad) you might have noticed that not only have the posts been scarce, but the site itself was sorely neglected. So recently, where I thought I had more to share, I became more and more bothered by the state of my blogging software. So a few weeks ago I sat down to upgrade.

For a short time I considered using this as a good opportunity to write my own blogging software. I reasoned that since I was building it for only my consumption (the administrative functions, that is) that I wouldn’t have to build all of the bells and whistles into it and might be able to build it fairly quickly. Of course, my plan was to leverage the XMLREST framework that I’ve talked about here and here. But then I started thinking about categories, and tags, and spam filters, and… and I decided that I’d likely get bored long before I created something that was really functional, so I came back to the task of upgrading WordPress.

The WordPress docs point out that the auto upgrade, “which will work for most people”, is the easiest – and I couldn’t agree more, having used it on other occasions – but, well, I’ve often been accused of not being like most people. The auto upgrade option is available from version 2.7 on but, eegahds!!, I was on 2.2.something (I’ve really neglected things!). So I had to do the manual.

The long story involves:

• figuring that an upgrade would be very problematic because of how large of a gap there was between what I had installed and the latest version (have you ever heard of enterprise software skipping releases and have a decent upgrade experience?!), I set up another blog side-by side, using the WordPress export and import functions. This worked fabulously, but would break any permalinks that folks (hi again Dad) might have to the old entries, because my old permalinks had post IDs in them (and the post IDs changed on import).
• and then when I sat down to implement the redirects I thought, “what the heck, let’s just try upgrading the old installation, if it fails, I’ve already got the new site up and running.”

I did as the WordPress docs advised, downloaded and unzipped the latest version, used my ftp client to upload that on top of my existing deployment (overwriting files) and then accessed the admin page. Indeed, it asked to upgrade the DB, which I did, and voila – my blog is upgraded. I had spent some time setting up a new theme which I brought over from the parallel, temporary blog, only had to tweak a few things by hand and I was golden.

All of this is to say – this is software that is easy to use, has ample documentation and works as advertised. This is something that all technology vendors should strive for! I love WordPress.