It seems I tried to update WordPress about a year ago. June 2007 was my last post. Since WordPress version 2.2 was released on Tuesday, May 15, 2007, that was probably the version I tried to upgrade to.
It failed.
It failed with the notorious Post-upgrade-you-haven’t-installed-WP trap. It goes like this, though it has been so long, I can’t remember precise details: I upgraded WordPress, according to a careful reading of the upgrade instructions. This involves obliterating the former installation (which I must have backed up since 1.5.2 is what I am using now). After everything is overwritten, except a couple specific things that have to be held aside and then copied back, I browse to upgrade.php, which implies a process, but then cutely reveals that the process is all done, telling you happily that it is really only one step. With what I now know is morose irony, the upgrade program provides the link to login.php behind the hypertext ‘Have fun!’ Clicking there, I was led to the dreaded “It doesn’t look like you’ve installed WP yet. Try running install.php.”
Have fun.
With no other alternative even remotely accessible, I do as told and click on install.php. What feeble hope I have left is then completely drowned with the output, “You appear to have already installed WordPress. To reinstall please clear your old database tables first.”
Having lots of fun.
That was a year and a month ago. I searched high and low for a solution, many days in a row at first and then as discouragement set in, less often. And I attempted every conceivable variation of the recieved wisdom, that all the database tables needed to be ‘dropped’ in order to recover from my failed upgrade. That would have eliminated eight years of accumulated blog posts. They would of course continue to exist in the db.sql file which I had saved, but there they were as inaccessible to me as if they had all been deleted because I could now no longer get into that database with WP 1.5.2, since the attempted upgrade had altered some crucial part of the database. And every fresh installation of WP 2.2 required an empty database.
Could I have imported the wp_posts table from 1.5.2 into whatever the equivalent would be in 2.2? If so what is the equivalent? But then what about comments? And if any of these were possible, why was there no suggestion of such a remedy anywhere?
I gave up for a year. Even though my blog writing had only been in fits and starts, I kinda continued it using flat html files. And as tedious as that method was, it was still less infuriating than wasting time trying to fix the WordPress 2.2 upfailure.
Today, after several months to forget the trauma of abruptly losing my WordPress blog, I took another look. I searched the same pages on WordPress.org and googled others eslewhere. Somewhere I read something that led me to try something different. I ’emptied’, not ‘dropped’, the wp_users table. Then I retraced the upgrade.php, to ‘Have fun!’, to ‘try install.php’ sequence again, and lo!, at install.php I was prompted for user settings. And finally I was directed to the long sought after login.php.
I don’t know how to make a long story short, as you may have guessed. But if I ever attempt to upgrade from WordPress 1.5.2 again, I will not do it by the recommended upgrade path. I will probably get a completely seperate WordPress installation up and running without touching this current installation. Then I will export all my posts from 1.5.2 and import them all into 2.whatever.