Upgrading To WordPress 2.3 This Weekend – Any Tips?

Here are some tips :)

1. Backup everything !
2. Remove the code for the tagging plugin in your blog to avoid errors
3. Deactivate the tagging plugin and the sitemap plugin
4. Copy the new tagging plugin to your plugin directory
5. Copy the new Wordpress files over your old ones (worked fine for me, if you are cautious delete the old files, upload the new ones)
6. Check the site for errors, if none proceed. If you see errors remove the corresponding code
7. activate the new taggin plugin.
8. import the tags from your old plugin, run it twice if you get a timeout
9. add the new tagging code to your blog

well that's it basically. the new tagging code is the default Wordpress function for tags, you find it in the default theme in single.php

Please note that some tags will be changed which leads to several 404s on your site. I think _ will be - or the other way round. not a huge problem though.

I really didn't find much in the way of gotchas but I'm also not making use of tags at this point - simply a category list in the sidebar.

There were several things I did before moving to 2.3 though:

1. Reviewed the current WordPress.org list of 2.3 compatible plugins.
2. Tested 2.3 with my theme in a subdomain.
3. Backed up - a copy of the database and the WordPress specific files just in case.
4. Disabled all plugins

The actual WordPress installation was uneventful. Best of luck!

First, WP2.3 is MUCH more system load intensive than previous versions for some reason. after installing it a week or so ago, our system load (UNIX load) went from average of 0.10 to average of 0.60 or so... under the same regular circumstances. ended up installing a separate lighweight web server to serve our images and lower the load - lighthttpd I think. that really helped.

Also, for tags: The UTW tag importer changed all multi-word tags to have a "dash" instead of a space. which added about 30 minutes to the migration until I figured out (found) a working mysql sql command to clean that up. I think I used all the following 3 queries from PHPMyAdmin.

USE THIS KNOWLEDGE WITH CAUTION and only as a starting point. and back up first. what you do to your data is your business. :-)
---
// get a look at the broken terms:
SELECT *
FROM `wp_terms`
WHERE name LIKE '%-%';

// see what the broken and fixed terms would look like
SELECT term_id, name, replace(name, '-', ' '), slug
FROM `wp_terms`
WHERE name LIKE '%-%'
and term_id

Use the WordPress Upgrade Preflight Check to check if there could be some problems with some plugins on your website. This plugin is not perfect, some plugins still worked after upgrade, even if it shows that this specific plugin might not work in 2.3

Check also the compatibility of your plugins with 2.3 at http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Plugin_Compatibility/2.3

You can also install the WP Plugins Tracker to check if you have the newest version of your plugins installed. After upgrade you can deinstall it, since this kind of function is in WP already included.

Just some more information, which wasn't already mentioned above.

Good luck, should be a smooth ride :)

you choose the right time.
weekend will be the perfect day.

all suggestion above are correct. it just, i think you may try an automatic upgrade here.

i used the instant upgrade plugin, i had to deactivate pmetrics first because of a pkzip error but after that it went through fine, the import tags from UTW worked well to. dead easy!

I am noticing these 405 errors with wp-comments. Anyone else notice it?

It really is a mighty big step, do be sure to backup your DB and files. You can upgrade to 2.3.1 right away.

Do check out my post on how to upgrade your theme to Wordpress 2.3 too!

pchere Yep i got this errors too.

Hmmm.. notice that there hasn't been any new posts as of late? Is it because the upgrade faltered?