Upgrading / uploading at same time – breaking old stuff

  • okieman

    (@okieman)


    11 years ago

    I found good tutorials about uploading from a localhost-developed site to a real server. But the site revision I’m doing for my church has several steps where bad stuff could happen to this WP newbie.

    The existing site (tulsaunity.com) is an older version of WordPress. After I back up all that content, might upgrading to a more recent version break the previous developer’s custom work? Yes I’m planning to immediately upload my new content (v4.2.2), but would like to know, partly because …

    If something about my upgrade causes a panic, can I “switch” back to the old version until I fix the problem? (My new version relies on Genesis plus a commercial theme, popular plugins, bit of HTML dropped into a few posts, and CSS mods tacked onto the bottom of style.css.)

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • catacaustic

    (@catacaustic)

    11 years ago

    I just want to say… It’s very good to see someone that’s asking about this before something goes wrong!

    In any update, there’s always a chance that something might not go 100% right, so that’s why backups are always needed. For me, the best way to do this is to use FTP to copy of all of the websites files on my local PC from the server to give me a complete copy locally. Then I’ll get a database dump and save that somewhere on my PC too.

    From there you should perform teh upgrades gradually. By that I mean do one plugin at a time, one theme at a time, and the core update last. I do it this wy mainly so I can tell if anything does go wrong I know where to go back to very quickly to find out to fix it.

    If the absolute worst happens and everything breaks you can re-upload the files, import the database back again and the site (should…) be back to where it was before and you can start again and do it a bit more carefully. Just remember that if the theme and plugins are coded well, nothing should go wrong. However that may or may not be a bit too much to ask for some authors out there from time to time.

    Thread Starter okieman

    (@okieman)

    10 years, 12 months ago

    Catacaustic thanks for the response. Sounds like advance planning and taking it step by step will carry the day. I wanted to be sure there wasn’t a huge gap in my logic. Only small gaps.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

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