We’ve successfully updated our site to WordPress 3.0.1 from 2.9.2.
It was a bit scary there for a while. Our site is hosted by GoDaddy, which despite being inexpensive, provides excellent service and services, and we’ve been happy with them for a number of years.
We have a Windows web hosting account, which provides a few occasional glitches – WordPress would prefer a Linux hosting account.
First, of course, we backed up our WordPress database. Don’t forget this step.
We went to the Automatic Upgrade link in our WordPress dashboard which is supposed to, with a single click, download the new version of WordPress and install it for you with no problem.
However, after the successful download, we kept getting “folder (or file) not writeable” errors during the upgrade process.
FileZilla, our FTP client of choice, is not able to set file or folder permissions in our Windows-hosted GoDaddy account. So instead we went in to the GoDaddy File Manager, which does allow us to add the Write permission. However, even after doing so to several requested files and folder, we continued to have difficulty.
Everntually, we ended up in a state where when you would go to www.soundsidesoftware.com, you would see a single line of text saying that the site was currently unavailable.
Well, we don’t get a lot of traffic right now, but I didn’t like this.
We double-checked to ensure our email was working properly and it was.
We then went to the WordPress web site. We noticed it said you could update to 3.0.1 either Automatically or Manually. It suggested one use of a manual installation is in the case of a failure in the Automatic installation. This was encouraging news for us.
So we followed the instructions for a Manual Update at http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress, and the site came back online without an issue.
Whew!
It did ask us to update our database upon first viewing, which it did for us with a single click and no hitches.