WordPress 2.6 update issues and finding older versions

I run several blogs for myself, and design clients. Taking over the maintenance of new blog clients is perhaps the biggest headache I have to deal with. Some haven’t been updated since version 2.0, so there are some pretty serious issues I’ve been dealing with lately, the most common being the “missing catagories” dilema. [Read about it in the WP support forums here, here and here.]

In one of the support forum discussions, it was suggested to update older versions to v2.3 first (since this is when the “tag” ability was introduced to the software, which required a major overhaul and update of the databases), and then updating to v2.6.

The first issue I had when finally deciding to try this, was finding a download for v2.3, which I finally found here. I wouldn’t suggest using these archived versions for any other purpose, as there have been security fixes in each progressive version, but in cases like this update problem, this comes in very handy.

This doesn’t help, of course, if you’ve already tried the upgrade, and lost all your categories… in that case, the work around I used on my first try (failure lol) was found here. Manually inputting your category information into your database via MyPHPadmin is no fun, but it did work. Since I’m facing an upgrade of a blog v2.0 that has over 56 categories, I’m going to try updating it to v2.3 first, as I have no desire to do that much data input.

Once our weather improves, I will be trying this “update in stages” approach. Right now, I’m afraid we’ll lose power while I’m in the middle of it. I’ll post again when I’ve finished the project to let you know how it worked out.

The best advice I have at this point is BACKUP everything first! Database, WP files, content folder, themes, plugins… everything! If the very worse happens, you can then simply revert to where you were before you started!

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