Migrating my blog & updating WordPress

I’m migrating my existing WordPress run blog site at blog.arabx.com.au to a my new site ronaldbradford.com (which is not yet publically available)

As part of this process I’ll be doing a number of upgrades/changes including:

  1. Update blog software to 2.5.1 from 2.0.2 (I’d previously done a 2.0.2 upgrade to 2.3.2, but not deployed)
  2. Migrate to new domain
  3. Upgrade existing MySQL 5.1 version from 5.1.11 to 5.1.24
  4. Migrate database to using MySQL 5.1.24, from 5.0.22 (my server runs 5.0 and 5.1 instances)
  5. Split my blog into Professional & Personal

Upgrading
The upgrade is straightforward, backup database, download latest wordpress software. I run full revision to older versions via directories + symlinks so my installation is more complicated, but fully recoverable. Install, and run upgrade script. That all works, but my site breaks. Suspecting is my heavily customized them, by disabling that my site is up. One to add to the TODO list.

Migrate to new domain
Dump + Reload data into new schema. Copy WordPress install. I had to make two data changes to correctly use the new domain.


update wp_options set option_value='http://ronaldbradford.com/blog' where option_name='siteurl';
update wp_options set option_value='http://ronaldbradford.com/blog' where option_name='home';

Upgrade MySQL 5.1 version
That was also relatively straightforward. I was surprised I was running such an old 5.1.11, but I remember originally using 5.1.6 in production use before that.

Migrate database to 5.1 from 5.0
This is where my problems have begun. WordPress does not appear to like host+port stuff. I can confirm access via MySQL client. At 9:30pm Sunday night, this may have to remain in the unresolved bin for a few days.