Home of the Wanderer

Okay, so part of the reason I never quite got around to switching this blog to drupal was because I so dislike the process I’ve gone through when trying to upgrade from one version of drupal to the next. Perhaps that’s because I had customized a few of the modules I had installed, but nevertheless it was challenging. I had to refigure it out every time I made the attempt.

Now, as careful readers may have noticed, I have just upgraded the version of wordpress used to run this site. There was a security issue of some kind, and I don’t like leaving holes in the walls, so I dug in and prepared for a long and perilous task. Or, in any case, I took a look through the upgrade instructions. They looked simple and straightforward enough – delete and then replace a few directories and files, restore the ones you backed up earlier (you did back them up, right?), and you’re done.

I thought to myself that this could be even easier. Because I don’t have wordpress installed in the documentroot, or even in the main directory where my web server looks for webpages, (/foo/bar/wandreilagh for the sake of this conversation), but rather in /foo/bar/wandreilagh/wp, I figured I could make a new directory wandreilagh/wp-2.0.6 in which to store the new version. Then I could overwrite the appropriate files from the old version onto the new, copy the old files to a directory called wp-2.0.5, and replace the old wp directory with a symbolic link pointing to the new wp-2.0.6 directory. If the site didn’t function for some reason, I could simply change the symlink to point to the old directory.

And lucky me, I was right. Got it on the first try. And I thought, in thanks for such a wonderful gift from the free software community, I might offer this as an upgrade process for others in a similar situation.