upgrade

I’ve been running a few instances of WordPress MU for a while now, so I was more than a little anxious about the merge of the MU functionality into the core of WordPress. It’s a good thing, but sometimes such dramatic changes pose rocky challenges.

Not so in this case.

Pete Mall blogged about it in May, and I’m happy to say that I followed those instructions (summary: upgrade, it will work) to upgrade both this site and Scriblio.net recently. The biggest challenge I faced was in migrating my SVN checkout (not discussed in Pete’s post, but people who install via FTP or use the auto upgrader don’t need to worry about this), and Pete noted the only gotcha that I might have encountered: changing the .htaccess to use a different file that had been used in WPMU.

I tested the migration on this site, and it rocked so much that I decided to go forward with upgrading the other site, even though WP3.0 hasn’t been formally released yet. Rock n roll.

ZDnet’s David Berlind complains that upgrades are painful:

Upgrading to new systems is one of the most painful things you can possibly do. If you’re a vendor of desktop/notebook systems, it also represents that point where you can keep or lose a customer. Today, most system vendors have pretty much nothing from a technology point of view that “encourages” loyalty. Upgrading from an old Dell to a new Dell is no easier than upgrading to a system from a competing vendor. The system vendor that figures out how to make it less painful to upgrade to their own systems than to their competitors’ is the one that will get more loyalty out of their customers.

Of course Apple’s been doing this for a while with their Migration Assistant tool.

I picked Plesk over CPanel as my server control panel because it was cheaper, looked better, and seemed to have all the features I wanted. What I didn’t know was that it came with PHP4 and MySQL3 at times when each was a major version ahead of that. When the good folks at my hosting provider tried to upgrade this, it conflicted with Plesk and they have to back off.

The answer, it seemed, was that I’d have to migrate from Plesk to CPanel to get those features. And now I’ve got a big database project, that’s looking more necessary than ever.

Why? Because MySQL 3.x doesn’t support query caching, boolean full-text searching, or complex subqueries.

In a simpler world, everything would be up to date and working, but in this world I’m trying to find a convenient time to migrate my stuff to CPanel.

Theme change not yet complete, but looking good. It’s a widened version of Clemens Orth’s Relaxation_3column, itself a derivitive of John Wrana‘s two columned Relaxation theme. I found it on the WordPress Codex, and though it was among the first group I looked at, I dutifully clicked through to every other three-columned theme listed there.

Anyway, expect the banner to change, and I’m working on how I want to handle the width on smaller monitors (where “smaller” actually equals anything narrower than 1280px). Eh, life goes on.