Having now finished the upgrade to WordPress 1.5, all I can say is Kudos to the wordpress team. Previously I was running version 1.2, which is 3 versions back. I hadn’t upgraded yet largely because there hadn’t been any reason to. 1.2 was working fine, everything was going nicely, no big deal.

Lately I’d gotten sick of the fact that comment spam and trackback spam were getting through 1.2 even though I had safeguards in place that specifically protected against that type of spam.

Eventually, the 20-30 minutes I was spending a day dealing with these attacks (there’s now a counter at the bottom of every page so you can feel my pain) got tiresome. I had some extra time this week and decided to deal with this.

My upgrade process was longer than most, largely because it was such a significant upgrade and I’d intended to try and keep the old design. The process ended up being:

1. Copy database to new server
2. Copy files to new server
3. Get independent copy of Ensight running
4. Upgrade software (the upgrade instructions at wordpress.org were bang on, it only took me about 20 minutes to do everything)
5. Install new template (just to see how things were supposed to work)
6. Realize that the difference between new and old template was extreme, and that I felt like a change anyways, so went to find a template I liked
7. Install new template
8. Install plugins, addins, comment and trackback spam notification, extra doodads
9. Customize template
10. Tidy up

Overall I probably spent 5-7 hours on this upgrade. Which isn’t bad, considering that my last major upgrade (MovableType to WordPress 1.2) took nearly 6 days.

I’m happy with the state of things, I’m happy with this interim design and I’m very happy with the wordpress team.

The new software and the new design definitely allow me to do the work going forward that I needed to do. Plus, I like it, which is always a good thing ;-)