Judging from the WordPress.org forums, some people are having major problems upgrading to 2.8. Blank Admin screens. Totally borked installations. Bizarre error messages. However, many of these problems can easily be avoided. Here’s how.
- Insure your theme and plugins are compatible with WordPress 2.8. Click through from the Plugins and Themes pages in Admin to the author’s site to check. This is crucial.
- Backup up your WordPress database using your Control Panel or with the WP Backup plugin.
- Backup up your WordPress installation, most especially the wp-content folder and subfolders. This is where your themes, plugins, and uploaded images are.
- Disable all plugins before upgrading. This is absolutely crucial. Then activate them one by one after the upgrade to make sure everything is still working.
Optional
- Upgrade manually. Don’t use the automatic upgrade. Yes, autograde works great – except when it doesn’t. Manual upgrading is simple enough, and some with hosed 2.8 upgrades after an autoupgrade fixed the problems by doing a manual upgrade.
- Wait. You don’t have to upgrade. I’ll probably wait until the first 2.8 bug fix version to upgrade Polizeros even though a manual upgrade I did on another blog worked fine.