scriptygoddess

12 Feb, 2009

IMPORTANT – WARNING – BEFORE YOU UPGRADE WORDPRESS

Posted by: Jennifer In: Announcements|WordPress|WordPress: Lessons Learned

If you are using the default theme and have made modifications to it without renaming it – you may be in for a surprise when you upgrade using the new easy auto-upgrade button. Your theme will be replaced with the original one that WordPress came with. For all I know there's probably already a document/installation instruction that warns you of this fact somewhere. (I would hope anyway)

I know this may or may not apply to many people – but having just lost a bunch of changes on a site I was working on (had been tweaking the default theme to test out some stuff) I didn't realize that 1-click upgrade feature would do that.

Other than that – the new upgrade thing is awesome. Easily upgraded a bunch of other sites (that thankfully used custom named themes!) without issue and because it just a one-click upgrade – I did it much sooner than I would have if I had to download and manually upload everything.

6 Responses to "IMPORTANT – WARNING – BEFORE YOU UPGRADE WORDPRESS"

1 | Peter

February 12th, 2009 at 10:25 pm

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That would also have been a problem if you manually upgraded, right? I guess it depends on your approach. I usually just extract the entire WordPress download on top of my existing installation. Does the automatic upgrade also overwrite everything or does it go one step further by deleting the default theme folder first (thus removing any new files you had created)?

2 | Jennifer

February 12th, 2009 at 10:30 pm

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It wouldn't have been a problem had I done a manual upgrade – because usually, when I do a manual upgrade, I don't copy over the wp-content folder. Not sure if it would delete new files.

3 | Veneficus Unus

February 18th, 2009 at 3:11 pm

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I got a shock when I upgraded and never realized this. I had been testing my plugin on a localhost testbed and using the default theme to test on, I upgraded and suddenly all my edits were gone. I must admit I had a bit of a panic. 😆

4 | bubazoo

May 7th, 2009 at 5:14 pm

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hey scripty, its me Tom. I haven't been here in ages, how you been?

I had a catastrophy happen to me the other day. If my divorce wasn't bad enough, I moved to a new city right around the time my hosting was due. I was like 2 days late paying my bill, not too bad, not like it was a month or anything. but anyway, ya know moving toa new town, I had to change banks, change paypal accounts due to the address and phone # and bank change, which took several days, but anyway, I was only 2 days late paying my bill,
and my web hosting provider, Future Hosting, deleted my VPS!! and my offsite backups,
which was why I never kept a backup on my own computer because I knew I had several
offsite backups, but when I was 2 days late on that bill, they deleted my offsite backups too, which I was very pissed about.

I lost 15 years of my lifes work. GONE in 2 seconds. All my scripts, plugins, site designs,
everything… so if my divorce wasn't bad enough to go thru, watching my ex cheat on me with my arch enemy from online from years back, now having to deal with this too. For awhile, I was just going to give up on having a blog and a website, 15 years down the tube that was my first instinct, but then I thought well, if I could code once, I could surely do it again, but the years of getting older have made me forget stuff. so I've had a frustrating trying life as of late. How is everything going with you?

Tom

5 | bubazoo

May 7th, 2009 at 5:18 pm

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btw, I've been having trouble with that gravatar site. My gravatar never shows up,
and I paid the $10 to have multiple addresses. my gravatar shows up if I go
directly to the test link, but never on anyone elses site, its the oddest thing.
I've also had problems getting into my gravatar account because of an email
change that happened recently.

6 | janne@web design

May 30th, 2009 at 3:07 am

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This is why you shall develop your theme or another folder, even home2/ would be enough. But you don't have cpanel/server backups including your old theme?

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  • Scott: Just moved changed the site URL as WP's installed in a subfolder. Cookie clearance worked for me. Thanks!
  • Stephen Lareau: Hi great blog thanks. Just thought I would add that it helps to put target = like this:1-800-555-1212 and
  • Cord Blomquist: Jennifer, you may want to check out tp2wp.com, a new service my company just launched that converts TypePad and Movable Type export files into WordPre

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