Migrating to Wordpress 2.7

Done!  Last night we decided to give Wordpress 2.7 a try (we were using 2.6). The migration was painless.

We followed the procedure proposed by Wordpress. We started by exporting the database. Then we simply had to download Wordpress 2.7 and add it to the appropriate folder on our server. The following steps were fairly straightforward:  copy of the files (images, etc.) from the old system to the new, recycle all the plugins and theme versions. Because we did not want to post a maintenance page and we wanted to have the blog up and running at all time, we had to find a little trick. Here it is:  first, we created a new instance of the database; we imported the database export (from the 2.6 version). The trick here was to go to the table “wp_options” and modify the URL using the “siteurl” field. The site at this point was our current version (http://blog.gifteer.com). We had to replace this URL by the technical address of our site that was in the process of migrating. Then we upgraded Wordpress on the technical address, using the upgrade.php script. The upgrade was almost instantaneous. Last step:  DNS change. If you are still with me you’ll know we had to prepare the database to migrate to the production URL. No need to go the database because we had provided this information to the Wordpress admin. The whole thing took less than two hours. The longest was the DNS propagation.

If you are still on the 2.6 version, don’t hesitate. The plugins we had migrated to the 2.7 versions flawlessly. The new admin is well thought and fast.