franzone.com

WordPress 2.9 was release somewhat recently and so like a good WP minion I logged into my site and clicked the update button. Error… uh oh. Apparently WordPress 2.9 requires a more recent version of MySQL (>= 4.1.2). My host installed MySQL 5 ages ago but I’ve never bothered with migrating to the new version because I didn’t have a reason to. Now I do. So here’s how my upgrade went.

First I made a full backup of both the web content and the MySQL database. The MySQL database backup was just a mysqldump command like so:

mysqldump -h [HOST] \
          -u [USER] \
          -p[PASSWORD] \
          [DATABASE NAME] > franzone_com_backup.sql

I then restored the SQL backup  to my new MySQL 5 database like so:

mysql -h [HOST] \
      -u [USER] \
      -p[PASSWORD] \
      [DATABASE NAME] < franzone_com_backup.sql

Amazingly I did not have any errors… I guess it is a good day! Next I changed my WordPress config to point to the new database by modifying <WEB HOME>/wp-config.php and setting the appropriate new values in:

// Put the appropriate values for your environment
define('DB_NAME', 'DATABASE_NAME');
define('DB_USER', 'USERNAME');
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'PASSWORD');
define('DB_HOST', 'HOST');

I pulled up http://www.franzone.com and all looked fine (other than the fact that my blog design is in serious need of updating). I then logged into my WordPress administration site and flushed the cache from WP-Super-Cache and went back to the home page. Everything still looks fine. Now I updated my backup scripts with the new database information and performed yet another backup.

Ok, final step is to upgrade WordPress. I can login to the WordPress administration and have the software do this for me automagically. Everything went smoothly. One last backup and I’m done.