Wordpress 2.5 Upgrade – Ubuntu Tutorials

After some testing on some of my less-popular blogs I’ve upgraded this one to WordPress 2.5. The whole ordeal seemed fairly painless (although with the number of blogs I host I really should consider WPMU).

I use svn to manage my installations which makes it really simple. If you’re considering an upgrade, these are the steps I followed:

Make a backup of your current data–can’t be too safe. Export your current database & php.
De-activate current plugins
change to the root directory of your blog and execute:
svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5/
I had an issue with Akismet, so I also then did:
rm -r wp-content/plugins/akismet/
svn up
visit http://your-site.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php
re-activate plugins
Done

I want to congratulate the WordPress team for a great release. Things look really sharp this time around and there look to be a lot of UI improvements. I’m also glad to see I didn’t have any issues upgrading like I did after the early 2.2.x series.

8 thoughts on “WordPress 2.5 Upgrade”

Chip Bennett 2008/03/30

(testing OpenID commenting)

Chip Bennett 2008/03/30

I also upgraded to WP version 2.5 this weekend; like yours, my experience was relatively painless. Thus far, I’ve not experienced any real problems (and like the admin UI changes).

However, I notice that you had a pretty lengthy upgrade instruction list. I would like to recommend that you look into WordPress Automatic Upgrade (most recent version available in the wordpress.org plugin repository), for guided and painless upgrades.

The WPAU plugin will guide the upgrade automatically, from performing file/database backups, to putting the blog in maintenance mode, disabling active plugins, fetching and installing the upgrade files, upgrading the database, and re-enabling previously active plugins.

It has been a great help for me in keeping my wordpress installation always up to date.

Venturi Wang 2008/04/11

test

Maurice Walshe 2008/04/17

you also need to add the SECRET_KEY entry to the wp-config – whey the upgrade script doesnt do this I dont know

Mike Brennan 2008/04/22

I think you have one minor typo. The command:
svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5/
should have a period at the end to tell subversion to put the files in the current directory. Otherwise, it puts them in a subdirectory called “2.5”. So the command should be:
svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5/ .
Other than that, this went smoothly for me. Thanks for the tip! I was tired of waiting for 2.5 to show up in the Ubuntu repositories, so I uninstalled WordPress (saving my wp-config.php before doing so), and switched to using subversion. Much better.