I am on Dreamhost which I find a pretty neat service - it has Mysql, subversion, php5, one-click installs of wordpress… One thing that I always seem to stuff up though is my upgrades of Wordpress.

This is not Dreamhost’s fault (although I would encourage them to have the option of deploying apps into Subversion so that applying deltas after one-click upgrades would be a cinch) but really down to me not remembering to do every step.

Here are my steps so that I and anyone else looking to solve an issue after upgrade may find resolution :

1. Do the 1-click upgrade and then actually wait for confirmation it has occured (I often forget about it completely and hence never get to step 2 or 3).
2. Make sure you then run the db upgrade script (wp-admin/upgrade.php). WP didn’t remind me to do this or I overlooked it. The consequence of not doing this could be a broken feed due to a missing table error.
3. Reapply any changes you have made - for instance I have added an ‘ob_end_clean’ before generation of RSS feeds to ensure there is no whitespace that annoys XML parsers - something that became an issue for this blog a while back. Again the consequence of not doing this could be a broken page or feed.

Simple, huh? Except I forget at least one of these steps every time. It goes to show that those things that are seldom on your mind get filed away in a manner less retrievable than the search function on this blog. Hopefully I remember to read this post next time!

Stumble it!