To Upgrade, or Not
Posted: Wed 11 February, 2009 Filed under: D4D™, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Geeky, Redesign, Thoughts 4 Comments »One of the current questions I keep coming back to with D4D™ is whether I should bother upgrading my WordPress install to get me back up to date.
As it is, D4D™ still runs on WP 2.1 , and the current version is 2.7 . It’s so behind the times that I know I should go through the pain of a multi-version upgrade, but I honestly don’t know if I can actually be bothered.
I’m very aware that when I moved over to WP, it was a pain – although I wouldn’t go back now, believe me – and I know that the D4D™ template has been corrupted by me to within an inch of its life.
Of course, I could do the upgrade, and put D4D™ into a WP template for a while. That’d be quite a shock to the system, wouldn’t it? If I were to go that route, I’d also be putting into place at least the basics of a re-plan of how things go on D4D™ including taking out a lot of the old sections that really aren’t looked at any more, and just a bit of a tidy up.
Oh, and a move to a new/different host. After all, why make things simple and do just one thing at a time? That’s no bloody fun at all…
All I can say is that I like 2.7 very, very much. It blows 2.1 out of the water in terms of admin capabilities and so on. Sure I haven’t messed around with the design much yet but it really wasn’t a problem. Think I upgraded from 2.3. I don’t know how much you may have modified the db though but I had absolutely no problem upgrading.
Aside from my FTP failing half way through the upload of new files because my connection dropped that is. Wasn’t exactly a game breaker though.
I’ve been fairly good on not abusing the database, to be honest. I’ve got extra tables for certain things (the ever-changing page titles, for one) but I don’t abuse the WP tables. I did once, and then everything broke on an upgrade, so I learned my lesson, and don’t fuck with the established bits…
To be honest, it’s only a blog. You’re not going to lose revenue if it’s down for a few days. I say do the upgrade in one step, leave your templates unchanged, and see what happens.
I also did a multi-version upgrade to WP 2.7 and it all worked without any problems. I wasn’t making such a big jump, but I was still using templates that hadn’t been upgraded since v1.4. Nevertheless, everything still worked (although I had problems trying to add new features to those templates later).