halninethousand

Okay, according to the tech I talked to (and who, luckily, had a slow night and needed to kill time), here’s what he said would have worked from the start:

1) Backup the WordPress directory
2) Backup the WordPress database directory
3) Uninstall WordPress 2.5.1 from my account
4) Install WordPress 2.7 to my account
5) Copy the files in the old WordPress database directory into the new one, replacing ALL files in there (or wiping the directory first)
6) Go directly to http://mydomain.com/wordpress/wp-login.php
7) Log in
8) WordPress sees the database is not up to date and says it will update it — database is updated
9) Copy the wp-content and wordpress directories INSIDE the wordpress backup directory on the web site to the new wordpress directory on the site so all the images and media are left intact
10) RESTART MySQL. On my account, that was “/etc/init.d/mysql restart” but could vary on different setups.

And, according to him, that’s what it took.

So database schema, my skills, and so on, really had nothing to do with it. Since DB files had to be updated, if I had read and understood schema, I would have seen they were different and not known what to do.

One point, and I don’t know if this is a WordPress issue, is that on my earlier attempts to upgrade, the first thing I did was go to the main WordPress page on my website and I got the new install one post entry saying something like, “This is your WordPress blog.” I don’t know if the problem was going there before logging in or if it was that I did not restart MySQL first.

So, overall, the answer is not in comparing one schema with another. It’s in what is backed up and restored because WordPress does the conversion automatically. If someone could have told me it would automatically update those tables, that would have been the quick and easy answer here.

Yep, even though I know my hosting company won’t like it, I put WP 2.5.1 back in place, including the database files and directory, check that it’s all as it should be — and my blog is gone.

So if anyone can help me rescue my blog — someone that doesn’t expect me to read schemas that not everyone has the training to understand, I’d deeply appreciate it.

Okay, is it that nobody here really knows this, or is there a better place for me to ask for help on this?

Fixed.

I didn’t want to restore and retry without getting any info on what went wrong, but I tried the command that caused the error on the backup db and it worked, so I figured (hoped) it was a glitch. I restored and retried and it worked fine.

Where is the upgrade.php file? I ran one upgrade and got, “Upgrade not needed.”

Thanks!