Chris Blackwell’s Domain

WordPress 2.5 was released earlier this week and it brings an array of new features that most of us have been looking forward to. However, I found the documentation on upgrading to be very vague. While the upgrade is a simple process, I thought a more detailed explanation of the steps to take would be valuable to everyone who wants to do the upgrade. I have broken down the upgrade into nine simple steps that will make sure your WordPress upgrade goes smoothly and error free.

1. Download the WordPress 2.5 package: The first thing to do is go to the WordPress homepage and download the latest WordPress package. Save the ZIP file to your desktop, or wherever is easiest for you to manage. Once the download is complete unzip the entire package. You should now have a folder named wordpress with all the new WordPress files in it. I recommend renaming this folder to new-wordpress so not to get confused later on.
2. Backup your database: I hope this goes without saying but I’ve put it down here just as a reminder. You should download your complete database in full structure and data. I use the plugin WP-DB-Backup, which sends daily backups of my WordPress database to my email automatically. I highly recommend this extension as it allows you to automate your backup process.
3. Download all your files: Even though you are going to be replacing all your old files with the new WordPress files it will be good to have a backup of the old ones for restore purposes. If anything goes wrong with the upgrade you will now have all the files and the database from before the upgrade. The other part here is that you will need the contents of the wp-content folder and the wp-config.php file after you upload all the new WordPress files.
4. Edit the wp-config.php file: Open up the folder with the new WordPress files in it. In this folder there should be a file named wp-config-sample.php. Rename this file to wp-config.php then open it in a text editor. Here you will be able to enter your database name, username and password. You can get this information from the wp-config.php file from your old WordPress files which you just downloaded. Most of the other settings in this file can usually be left as default, but check with your host to make sure.
5. Upload new WordPress files: Once you have downloaded all the old WordPress files it will be time to upload the new ones. I recommend deleting the old files on your web server first, just to make sure your FTP program doesn’t skip over any by accident. Find the folder you renamed earlier to new-wordpress and upload all the new files in the folder to the same directory that you just removed your old WordPress files from.
6. Upload the old wp-content folder: Go back to your old WordPress files which you downloaded earlier and upload your plugins, uploaded files, and themes from the wp-content folder. This is a good time to check your plugins directory to make sure you are not uploading any old plugins which you are not using anymore.
7. Update your WordPress database to version 2.5 : Point your browser to www.your-domain.tld/wp-admin/upgrade.php and a WordPress update page should appear. Click on continue and your database upgrade should be underway. Depending on the amount of content on your website, this may be instantaneous or could take a few minutes. When the upgrade is complete, you should now be running WordPress 2.5. Go to the WordPress dashboard to check for any messages or errors that may have been logged.
8. Upgrade Plugins: One of my favorite features of WordPress 2.5 is the automatic plugin upgrades. From the dashboard, click on Plugins on the right hand side beside Settings. If any of your plugins have upgrades available, you will see an Upgrade plugin link below them. If any of your plugins need an update, just click this link and let WordPress do the rest.
9. Check for any errors: At this stage your WordPress blog should be running and stable with version 2.5. Check your site for any coding errors that may pop-up if you have any code reliant on version 2.3 or earlier. In most cases there won’t be any errors as the template code has not changed very much, but if there are any, make notes and start Googling for answers.

One final note that is not a step but is equally important. Do this upgrade when your traffic is at a minimum. Go to your statistics program that you use and look to see what time of day your traffic is at a minimum. For my site it is between 4:00 am to 7:00 am. So ideally I would preform this upgrade at around 5:30 am and give myself a good hour to check for errors and downtime, before traffic starts picking up again. I hope this guide has you well on your way to WordPress 2.5. What do you think of WordPress 2.5? Was it everything you were hoping for? How would you change it?

Apple today officially announced the iPhone will launch later this month in Canada on the Rogers Wireless network. This comes as some surprising news, as we reported earlier that the iPhone was not due to launch in Canada until September 8. Apple has announced that the 16GB iPhone will be available for $499 with a 3-year contract. The data rate plans are said to be along the same lines as the AT&T plans that are currently offered with the iPhone. Sorry to everyone out there who is currently giving their hopes up. Hope you all have a good April Fools Day!

Have you ever watched the television show Clean Sweep on TLC? Well, the host of that television show, Peter Walsh, has take his experience and turned it into the bestselling book It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff. The book teaches you how to cleanup your house and live a more clutter free lifestyle. I love the clutter free lifestyle and try very hard to keep my house clutter free, but this book opened my eyes to some things even I was doing wrong.

The book itself is broken down into a very easy to follow structure. Part one of the book starts with some case studies telling us how clutter can take control of your life. Then he goes into explaining why you have to remove the clutter from your life, and how you can live a better life clutter free. Part two of the book moves into his six step process for removing all the “stuff” from your house. This six step process is the bulk of the book and is very logically put together. Peter does a great job of breaking down each step and how you need to go about it, even in different scenarios and situations.

Conclusions

This is a very good book for anyone who loves living clutter free, likes to increase their productivity, and generally wants to live a better life. I highly recommend picking this book up, and maybe even a few extra copies for some disorganized friends or family members.

Drupal 6 has been out for a little over a month now and I just finished converting the Xray Sierra website to it. On the surface it looks very similar to Drupal 5 but there are some great new features that I love and important improvements that will build the way to Drupal 7.

Upgrading Drupal

Upgrading from Drupal 5.x is relatively easy and I didn’t have any major problems that I found. You first must uninstall all themes and modules and then put the site in off-line mode. You can not upgrade from Drupal 4.x to Drupal 6. You must first upgrade to version 5 and then to 6. Most modules are not yet compatible with Drupal 6 and that will hold a lot of people back for a while.

OpenID Now Included

The inclusion of the OpenID module is a great victory for the OpenID community. I have been a long supporter of OpenID and I am very glad that Drupal has decided to include it with their list of core modules. OpenID is not activated by default and must be turned on by navigating to Site Building => Modules, then checking the box next to OpenID and saving the new settings.

Should I upgrade now?

I found the upgrade relatively easy. There were a few problems with the existing template I had on my Drupal site, but only because the new theme engine has changed a little. The extensions were a big issue as many of the most popular extensions have not been upgraded to support Drupal 6 as of yet. If you are an early adopter and love have the latest version installed on everything, then by all means go ahead. You will find Drupal 6 to be quite useful and stable, but extension-less.

Web 3.0 and the semantic web have taken some big steps forward as of late. Last week Yahoo! announced that they will be opening up their Open Search platform to allow third parties semantic information to be placed in the search results for a relevant query.

What is the semantic web?

For those who don’t know, the semantic web is the ability to label data according to a set of standard tags for categorization and reference. For example; a contact page usually has some standard information posted on it including phone numbers, email accounts, IM contacts, etc. However, there is no way for a search engine or computer to discern information. Any modern day search engine can read the numbers, the email addresses, the IM addresses but would not be able to asses which number is associated with which person or department.

Using the semantic web, information can be easily tagged including phone and fax numbers and ay other important information readily available to the user. This information is now labelled and accessible to a search engine for usage. If a user searched for ABC Company, the search engine would be able to list ABC Company’s address, phone number, hours of operation and email addresses, all on the search engine results page.

I am really looking forward to the semantic web and what it will bring to a user’s experience of a website or web application. The semantic web will allow users to aggregate data into a clean, and readable format. They will not be bombarded with useless information any longer while trying to find a very specific subject. I predict we will see the semantic web take some big steps forward this year, but I expect it’s break-out will happen in 2009.