What did you get for christmas? This year I vacationed in Vancouver and the best present I got was time.

Time to read
Time to with my family
Time with my friends
Time in the mountains
Time to drive a 4×4
Time to wander the markets
Time to finally upgrade this space

 

I’ve struggled to get the automatic updates for WordPress working and was forced to embrace an extended manual upgrade.  Here are my musing on the process.

Backup the truck

The golden rule of any upgrade is to back up your existing system.  I’ve been a fan of Cyberduck FTP for a several years and used this application to zip up my WP installation on the server and download a copy to my Mac.

Health Check

I contacted Communilink – my ISP in Hong Kong – to migrate the backend services to the latest versions of PHP and MySQL.  This also required a DNS update which takes a 24 – 72 hours. I used the downtime to create the logo for this site using Adobe Illustrator.

Filing and Testing

With the DNS updated, I needed a quick way to remove all of the old WP files and replace them with the updated versions.  Doing this via FTP can take a long time so I learned how to use Terminal on the Mac to TELNET to my web server.  With a little help from my friend @saeed_rahman I was able to diagnose some display errors and get the site up and running.

Have you ever performed a manual WordPress upgrade?  What advise would you give others?