Playing with Technology

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. ~Arthur C. Clarke

The great Voices upgrade of 2010

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Ah, July, the month of software upgrades on college campuses across the nation. It is no different at Wooster. This July we will be upgrading the two main application for which I am the administrator, WordPress and Moodle. Of the two I am most interested in WordPress since there are a host of new features and because the Multi User aspect has been rolled into the core software and rebranded as Multi Site.

This change should open up a world of plugins for MS installations that MU installs could not really count on. It also is a huge undertaking since we have been running 2.8.6 for the past year. I just want to document the steps I’m taking on the test server for upgrading from 2.8.6 to 3.0.

  • Disable BP Events plugin (breaks when upgrading to 2.9.2 with white screen)
  • Disable Incsub Support, Wibstats, RA BP Author Link, RA Featured Posts in mu-plugins (move to retired-mu-plugins)
  • Switch themes to a generic theme
  • Rename our modified BP Corporate theme to Wooster BP Corporate
  • Enable Wooster BP Corporate theme for main site
  • Activate Wooster BP Corporate theme
  • Upgrade BP Corporate Theme (download from WPMU Dev Premium)
  • Rename BP Corporate Child theme to BP Corporate Wooster Child
  • Copy header.php from BP Corporate theme to the Wooster Child and add the modifications to allow rotating header images
  • Upgrade from 2.8.6 to 2.9.2
  • Disable Ahjira Recent Site-wide Posts (broken with newer BuddyPress versions)
  • Upgrade any plugins that indicate they need it (BuddyPress and BP Groupblogs excluded)
  • Disable BuddyPress and BP Groupblogs
  • Upgrade BuddyPress
  • Upgrade BP Groupblogs
  • Switch the theme to BP Corporate Wooster Child (our old modified version of BP Corporate doesn’t work with new BuddyPress)
  • Run the Upgrade script to update all the blogs (takes a long time, maybe 2 hours)
  • Click the Update to 3.0 button in the Dashboard
  • Click Upgrade Automatically
  • Follow the instructions in the Dashboard header
  • Click on Update Network (and wait 2 hours for it to finish)

After this lengthy process Voices should be upgraded to WordPress 3.0 with the latest BuddyPress. One item of note is that any changes that were supposed to be made to .htaccess need to be made to the wpmu-rewrite.conf file of the Apache2 install. Our SysAdmin does not use .htaccess and has those directives in this special Apache2 config file. This means an Apache restart will be required for images to work after the upgrade from 2.9.2 to 3.0.