05.03.08

Fantastico no longer so fantastic (and other long-delayed WordPress upgrades)

Posted in Life, Software at 6:44 pm by Smokey

A few years ago, Fantastico was the must-have feature when choosing a web-hosting company. Fantastico offered one-click installation and upgrades of popular web software packages (e.g., blogs, fora, wikis), which made it trivial for the average user to join the “participatory” world of the so-called “Web 2.0” rage. Indeed, when comparing hosting providers (something I had been doing since about 2002 when .Mac became a subscription service), I made sure to settle on a “Fantastico-enabled” host.

Initially things were great; WordPress updates appeared in Fantastico within about a week of release (given that the Fantastico developers needed to QA any changes a WordPress upgrade might need in their software and that hosting providers should QA any Fantastico upgrade on their servers before deploying, six or eight days seemed both relatively fast and reasonable). As time went on, however, new versions of WordPress and their security upgrades started taking longer and longer to appear in Fantastico (the last WordPress upgrade I did with Fantastico, to 2.3.3, took almost 40 days to appear in Fantastico, and both WordPress 2.5 and now 2.5.1 have been released without Fantastico upgrades appearing yet), and exasperated users complained in hosting providers’ forums, and exasperated providers complained in the Fantastico forums. Fantastico was no longer so fantastic.

Seeing the writing on the wall, I had been looking for solutions that were elegant, efficient, and easy. WordPress recommended putting your WordPress install in a Subversion repository (not easy), and later the WordPress Automatic Update Plugin appeared (not efficient), but, frankly, I wanted something tested and supported, in case something happened (and if I was going to have to mess around with things, I’d rather just use patch like phpBB used to support; patch and I are friends). Not too long ago, my host announced support for SimpleScripts, which promised more up-to-date releases and updates. The only drawback was I’d have to do some sort of “migration” to get افكار و احلام into the SimpleScripts system, either migrate the installation itself or migrate the data. Yay, more deferred maintenance.

Finally, this weekend, I set aside some time to perform all of these delayed changes. I had been reading the threads about Fantastico→SimpleScripts WordPress migration in the BlueHost forum (as well as lots of other documentation) for the past few weeks, so I knew I needed to set aside a couple of hours in case anything went wrong. The steps were simple enough; they just required some quiet and time.

I ended up mostly following these instructions (phpMyAdmin database backup instructions I followed are here) to get my existing WordPress 2.3.3 install into SimpleScripts, though I changed steps 5 and 6, which eliminated steps 7-10:

• Use Coda (Have I mentioned how much I love Coda? No? OK, I will soon, then.) to copy afkar/ to afkar_copy/. This took more time than just renaming the existing directory, but it also meant that I didn’t have to re-upload themes, plug-ins, and other stuff in wp-content when I was done, but I still had a pristine copy to revert to in case of problems.
• Instead of having SimpleScripts create a new database, I had it update the existing database (I had several backups, from cPanel, WordPress itself, and the SQL backup from phpMyAdmin) using the information from my wp-config.php file. This is more “dangerous” and probably more trouble if something were to go wrong, but fewer steps if things went well (which they did for me).

Of course, I also had to fix the DB_CHARSET in wp-config.php again after the migration.

I then made another series of backups (though SimpleScripts will also create and restore backups when/after upgrading), disabled my installed plug-ins, and upgraded from 2.3.3 to 2.5.1. “Shiny,” as they say. I backed up again for good measure and then upgraded all of the WordPress plug-ins I had installed (a couple didn’t show updates in the WordPress UI, but I visited their sites and found there were updates available anyway).

Having now completed almost all deferred maintenance, and without any problems, I decided it was high time to fix that pesky DB_CHARSET issue once and for all. After all, nearly a year had passed since WordPress 2.2, and there were finally WordPress “instructions” on how to fix their poor database encoding choice/upgrade bug—except the instructions were just a general overview, suitable for folks familiar with databases, but not for average users. Fortunately, a user had written a plug-in to do the job for you. I had been reading about it for a while, it had been updated a couple of times, response had generally been positive (I had seen a couple of comments indicating it hadn’t worked at all, but also this recent one indicating success even with 2.5), and I had fresh database backups and some time left!

The plug-in dutifully warns that it’s only been tested against WordPress 2.2, but after I acknowledged that I was taking my database’s life into my own hands, it offered to proceed anyway. After the converter finished its work, the only thing I had to do was set the DB_CHARSET back to utf8 in wp-config.php; I hope this is the last time I will ever have to change that variable!

The end result of an hour or so of “work” is a fully up-to-date WordPress installation, a sane database, no more deferred maintenance sitting around, and, hopefully, quick upgrades to newer versions of WordPress in the future. SimpleScripts seems simple, efficient, elegant, and it even addresses my other complaint about Fantastico), so I’m hopeful it will remain simple for much longer than Fantastico remained fantastic. Thanks, as always, to the great folks on the internet whose commentary and instructions facilitated my afternoon of upgrades.

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