Upgrade to Wordpress 2.7

Posted by Keith on January 16, 2009 at 2:51 pm

I officially took the plunge today! I decided to upgrade Double Black Design to the latest and greatest version of WordPress. However, since this site uses the WP Remix theme the upgrade process was not as easy as I had expected.

The “Chicken and the Egg” Dilemma

So which really came first, the chicken or the egg? Even thought we will probably never be able to answer this question it is still fun to ponder. However, upgrading a WordPress based website should not raise a similar perplexing question. Unfortunately… the question of which to upgrade first, the WP Remix theme or the WordPress install, was exactly what I was faced with. Since the WP Remix theme integrates with the WordPress backend the version of the theme that I was currently running was incompatible with WordPress v2.7. Fortunately, a new release of the WP Remix theme was available and this version was compatible with WordPress v2.7. However, the requirement to upgrade both the WordPress backend and theme at the same time led me to this dilemma.

On Your Mark…

After pondering where to start for some time I decided to dive into upgrading the WP Remix theme first. Unfortunately, this was no easy task either as I had customized many of the theme’s files to provide the proper look and feel for my website. I think a better separation between the “user modifiable” and “theme core” code should be a requirement for the next release (…hint hint). I chose to start with the theme hoping that the theme was also backwards compatible with WordPress v2.6. Luckily, it was and after an hour or so of file comparisons I had the website back up and running.

The Home Stretch

Once the theme was operating successfully I utilized the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin to upgrade the WordPress installation to v2.7. If you do not have this plugin yet you need to stop whatever it is that you are doing and go download it (please finish reading this post first though…). This plugin is a huge timesaver and works flawlessly.

Mission Accomplished

As you can see, I was successfully able to perform the upgrade to WordPress v2.7. Otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this post right now!

One Gripe about WordPress v2.7…

The new WordPress v2.7 backend management interface is nice but I really wish that Matt and the guys at Automattic would stop messing with the look and feel of the backend management system. Each time they touch this it breaks numerous plugins (as well as the WP Remix theme) that integrate with the system. I think that they should make a formal release policy to only modify the look and feel of the backend management interface during major version releases (i.e. 1.x, 2.x, 3.x, etc…). What do you think?