My site (www.fromtheranks.com) has been up for some time but I've been terribly remiss (due to time constraints -- working and moving, twice) in doing necessary upgrades. I also recently had to move everything over to a new host, as my old one went belly up.

As you can see in the Title I'm still on WP2.7.1. and Atahualpa 3.3.3.

Trying to sort through and sort out the various posts here and on the WP site has left me with a very unclear picture on the best route through the upgrade process (other than be sure to back up my database and wp_content folder; of course).

My questions are (my initial questions are):

1. Should I upgrade WP to 3.1 first, then upgrade Atahualpa? Or vice versa?

• If I upgrade WP first, will Atahualpa 3.3.3 run on it?

• If I upgrade Atahualpa first, will 3.6.x run on 2.7.1?

2. When upgrading Atahualpa, what I've read suggests creating a separate theme folder, which makes sense. Except. Does this mean that I have to manually set up Atahualpa 3.6.x from scratch? There are a lot of settings and CSS code in my current version that would be rather time consuming to port over manually. If I have to I have to but I'm curious if the upgrade process actually reads the prior version and ports it over automatically.

3. Any known issues in upgrading directly through so many versions?

4. Finally, for now, I ran across a post somewhere that recommended uninstalling all of the widgets and plugins before upgrading WP. Is this correct?

Don

I would do this in stages
1) backup your database
2) manually install Atahualpa 353 and 364 (more about this later) see HOWTO: upgrade Atahualpa to a new version
3) upgrade Wp to 3.1
4) activate 353 see if it's ok (should be)
5) activate 3.6.4 see if it works - ou may hit the Suhosin issue so you can fall back to 353 if you do.

You can have all three versions in the theme picker, just put them in different folders.

Juggledad,

Nice to hear from you again. This makes sense as a strategy.

Followup Questions:

1. Is 3.5.3. the last stable release?
2. Since they're in separate folders I can but assume I'll have to manually reconfigure it with my 3.3.3 settings and CSS code?

Don

1. Is 3.5.3. the last stable release?

yes and no, it depends on if you run into the suhosin issue

2. Since they're in separate folders I can but assume I'll have to manually reconfigure it with my 3.3.3 settings and CSS code?

Nope, all the atahualpa settings are in the database. The only thing you will need to do is copy any header images into the 'atahualpa/images/header' folder and get rid of the default ones.

Juggledad,

Ahhh-hahhh! I was "assuming" (and we know what that does) that Atahualpa would be identified, in the database, by version number, too, such that the settings would be in separate records. Good to know.

One more follow-up, if I may, on the subject of un-installing widgets/plug-ins before doing the upgrade to WP3.1? Is that necessary? Or is best practice to:

1. record the settings for each widget/plug in,
2. uninstall them all,
3. do the WP upgrade,
4. track down new versions (if they exist) of each widget/plug-in
5. install each widget/plug-in

Don

Actually there is a difference in how Atahualpa stores the options from 3.3.3 to (I believe it was) 3.4.7 - starting then, instead of having a row for each option, now all the options are stored in one row meaning there is just one database call to fetch them all. But all releases since 3.4.7 use the same row.

the recommendation by WordPress, is to deactivate all plugins prior to doing an upgrade. Then reactivate and update them as needed. You shouldn't need to record any settings for widgets since they also store their options in the database.

Since you have a database backup (you do right) you can just try updating. FY!, a couple months ago I updates someone from WP 2.6 to 3.1 and Atahualpa 3.3.4 to 3.56.3 with no issues.

Goodness. Learning all sorts of interesting things today. I was busily taking screen shots of all of the plugin settings and dumping them into a Word doc, when your reply popped up.

As you might guess, there is one follow up question:

Actually there is a difference in how Atahualpa stores the options from 3.3.3 to (I believe it was) 3.4.7 - starting then, instead of having a row for each option, now all the options are stored in one row meaning there is just one database call to fetch them all. But all releases since 3.4.7 use the same row.

To make sure I am understanding correctly, 3.3.3 is storing its settings in multiple rows. Yes? Looking at the _options table via phpMyAdmin suggests this is the case as there are multiple bfa_ entries.

So, in the process of upgrading to 3.5.3 +, which is in single rows, will I, this one time, have to manually move all of my config settings and CSS code over? Or. The first time I install and run 3.5.3 will it read the multiple rows and concatenate them into one?

Don

the way it works is that when you activate 3.5.3, it will look for the 'bfa_ata4' row in the db, if it doesn't find it, it will look for the 'old' bfa' rows and build the 'bfa_ata4' row for future use.

If it was a new install and didn't find either, it would build the 'bfa_ata4' row from the defaults'

Excellent news! Thank you Juggledad! Expect a little something in your donation mail.

Don