This blog is now back online. However, it took about two weeks. It should have been a simple matter of just upgrading the old version of Wordpress to the most current. But if you ever dealt with managing technology, it is never a simple matter.
I launched this Blog back in May 2007 at which point the Wordpress version was 2.2. I was fairly happy with the software but recently noticed that the current new version 2.8.5 was lot more robust and secure. So I decided to upgrade.
The blog runs on a hosted platform, so I opted to upgrade via their control panel. That was mistake number one. Here is the message I received from them when I contacted them to find out why the upgrade did not work.
“Unfortunately upgrade option from Easy Apps collection is unstable and it isn’t recommended to use it. Please upgrade your applications manually or re-install the newest versions from scratch.”
My first though upon receiving this message was to cancel the account. But I cooled down and decided to to give them a chance to redeem themselves.
Luckily I had made a backup of my Wordpress Database, which runs on MySQL.
I exchanged several messages with the hosting provider trying to get the blog upgraded, but it was in vain. I realized that these guys were not going to be able to resolve the problem. So I contacted Wordpress. I conceptually knew what the problem was, but needed someone to vocalize it. I sent an email to Wordpress. This was their response after four days.
“This database dump is from a very old version of WordPress and several of the tables here do not exist anymore in a WordPress setup. You’ll need to install whatever version of WordPress you used at the time, get this data in through phpmyadmin, upgrade to the latest version of WP and then you can do a proper export.”
I wasn’t too happy with the response, since it could have been a little more detailed, telling me what version I was running and providing a link to that version. But it worked and I was happy for the help.
Notice the last two words in the quote, “proper export”. This was the key. Eventhough, I had a copy of the database, it didn’t matter, I could not import it using the myphp tools. You had to have the proper XML file from Wordpress with the posts, comments and categories. The problem was the incompatibility of the structure of the database tables. Some tables did not even exist anymore.
The lesson my friends, to avoid this mess is use the export function within Wordpress if you are planning an upgrade.
Tags: blog management, exporting worpress posts, problems importing worpress database, Worpress upgrade 2.2 to 2.8.5