Downgrading Wordpress Is a Chore

Somehow, I suddenly decided to upgrade my Wordpress to the 2.1 series today and it was the first wrong move I made. I thought at that time how long can it take, since Wordpress had always made things very easy to upgrade. Therefore, I downloaded and plan to spend 30minutes to set up Wordpress 2.1 on my blog before starting to study. Since Wordpress had always made things so easy, I didn’t think of making any backups and this was my second wrong move.

One thing led to another and I managed to install Wordpress 2.1 quite easily. As promised, it’s just a few clicks and viola, it’s up. The longest time spent is on uploading the files to the server. However, the trouble started from this point on, when I find the later version slower. Although it was stated that the new version had combed through their databases and made it more efficient, I found the new version quite significantly slower. Additionally, their functionality of dictionary checker isn’t really working. I tried typing ‘asdasdas asdasda asd ad’ and it claimed that there were no spelling mistakes.

I was surprised to find some problems with their categories editing and adding. At this point, I decided I didn’t want to try and figure out what’s wrong anymore, so I decided to downgrade my wordpress. The problem starts here, downgrading is not a one-click solution. Also, recalled that I didn’t think it was necessary to have a backup before I went ahead with all the upgrading. Therefore, I went through a hell lot of trouble trying to restore the new database to the older version and finally emerged victorious… after burning a precious 4 hours of my time. Great, I’m supposed to be studying during this time and I just burned them on trying to revert something. After 4 hours, I’m back to square one, with no improvements to the blog and just a lesson learnt. Always backup your stuff!

If I had a backup, then I wouldn’t need to figure out the databases and write queries to revert them. I could have just easily restored my backups in a quarter of the time. Imagine if I didn’t know how to revert back, it might have been worse… I might screw up my blog so badly that I lose my entries and stuff. I’m sure you won’t want this to happen to you, so the simple way out is to have backups.

With that said, I’m not saying that Wordpress 2.1 is problematic, but it could have been an oversight on my part as well, since I’m supposed to disable plugins before installing, but I didn’t saw that instruction. Many other people who did not disable plugins before trying to upgrade Wordpress faced a whole myriad of problems, so second lesson learnt: always read instructions.

It’s now late evening already and I’m totally emotionally drained. Yesterday, spent few hours getting rid of viruses and today… another few hours burned on this. Alright, I’ll forget about it, it’s dinner time!