Phew! I’ve now migrated 2 blogs (this one and a pretty dead one) to WordPress 2.6.1. Hooray! It was a much bigger job than usual because my run-by-friends-of-a-friend-in-their-spare-time ISP hadn’t upgraded the MySQL database software beyond version 3.23! I had done all the steps in the WordPress upgrade instructions and clicked on the upgrade database link, and then got the error: WordPress 2.6.1 needs MySQL 4.0.0. 
To give them their due, they set up a MySQL 5.0 database for me very quickly. But that was an empty database, so I had to schlep all the data from the old database to the new one, without any nice tools like phpMyAdmin 
Oh, and I couldn’t do it all in one go because I got weird out-of-space messages.
Because I exhibit the weird obsessive laziness of the geek, I had to write some scripts to save time (I will only actually save time if I remember to run them each time I upgrade), and because I’m rusty I had to look up shell scripting and some MySQL. (Yeah, really quick. The documentation was good, but I was v. rusty.)
Anyway, enough rambling. Katy took the children off to this Celtic place today, and they all came back tired but happy. (K and L came back with painted faces too – K’s was excellent.) I haven’t bothered to upload photos yet, but will in the next day or so.
All swished straight over my head but I remain extremely grateful that you know what you’re doing and what all that means
. Thanks again.
OOh got an odd error message when I submited that comment but it obviously did go through even so.
you know, I’ve never got into that level of laziness, mainly because I’ve not done shell scripting unless you count the stuff we used to do on OS/2 (which is probably closely related, but still not something I want to revisit).
So was it red or blue?
you missed a table:
bob.sk2_blacklist doesn’t exist.
I hope it’s happier now – I’ve added the missing table, with its data from the old version of things. Err, I think it was blue.
That is the sort of thing that dh does, and it drives me CRAZY!
I am convinced that it really would be a lot quicker just to stick the stuff in. But then I’m only a half techy geek……
A good programmer is never happier than when writing programmes to help them write programmes
I’ve of course tinkered with it now, so I just point the script at a directory containing the WordPress wp-config.php file and it extracts the database log-in info and the prefix for the table names, logs in to the db, dumps all the data from the tables that start with the magic prefix plus sk2_blacklist – each table going to a separate file, then compresses each file.
Future versions might make a decent cup of tea and tidy children’s bedrooms, but that might take a bit of work.