Success!!! Upgraded to WordPress 2.1.2 on Yahoo Hosting

I finally got my WordPress installation upgraded to WordPress 2.1.2 from WordPress 2.0.2.

I had installed WordPress 2.0.2 through the Yahoo control panel. I’d been unable to successfully upgrade, just getting a blank page when running upgrade.php. I’d followed all the instructions from WordPress for the upgrade. I’d assumed it was related to Yahoo restricting .htacess or a plugin they created to do permalinks.

But I tried one more time a couple days ago with the same result. I finally found this thread on the WordPress support forum that had been posted two weeks ago.

In short, follow the documented procedures to upgrade. Before running upgrade.php do the following to wp-config.php:

1. Backup the current wp-config.php
2. Edit wp-config.php and remove the line “Define(‘WP_CACHE’, true); //Added by WP-Cache Manager” (It’s not needed by 2.1)
3. Save the updated file and make a copy (you will need it later)
4. Edit wp-config.php and change DB_USER and DB_PASSWORD with your yroot user and yroot password and save the file. Yahoo describes these here: http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/webhosting/mysql/mysql-09.HTML. If you don’t know the password you can go into “MySQL Database” section of the control panel and select Database Administrator. You can change the password here (if you’ve used the ID in any php scripts you’ll need to update the scripts.) If all you’ve used MySQL for is WordPress you can safely change the password.
5. Now run upgrade.php. It should succeed.
6. Now replace the current wp-config.php (the one with the yroot account) with the one you saved in step 3.
7. WordPress will now run

It’s recommended you check all your plugins for upgrades and do them at the same time. I upgraded my theme, deactivated all my plugins, upgraded the plugins that had upgrades, then upgraded WordPress. Then I started the plugins one at a time to makes sure there weren’t any conflicts which is how I found the problem with wp-cache.

And to step back to the very beginning, use the “WordPress Database Backup” plugin to create a backup. I did two, I saved one to the server and had one sent to me via e-mail. I then copied the entire blog directory down to my Mac. it was easiest for me to just suck the whole directory tree down, but if you have a large site you may want to just take the WordPress files you’ll be deleting and replacing. (But don’t rely on your hosting provider to have a backup.)

I also upgrade my Tiga theme to 1.02 and upgraded the following plugins:
Askimet 2.0 (upgraded from 1.14)
Dean’s FCKEditor for WordPress 1.3 (upgraded from 1.2)
Search Everything 3 (upgraded from 2.6)
Sidebar Widgets 1.21 (upgraded from 1..20060711)

There was also a newer version of the WP Cache plugin. But when I installed it the blank pages came back and I had to remove it and re-edit wp-config.php. The WordPress forums implied this was probably a Yahoo problem. So it’s disabled.