How I Spent My Sunday

Actually, I should title this how I spent late Saturday night, into Sunday morning, and then most of my Sunday.

I started out trying to upgrade Movable Type on the Child Abuse site. It’s now running WordPress. Yes, the upgrade went that poorly.

Having been through a few upgrades that didn’t go well with movable Type, including at least 2 that ended with me reverting to the backup and the previous version, I have been through this enough to know better than to trust the upgrade process. Once i had that, I uploaded the new version over top of the existing MT install and ran the upgrade script. Only it didn’t finish. I got a 403-Forbidden error somewhere in the upgrade process. The only possible explanation, according to various sites, and the MT forums, was that I didn’t have rights to do something with the database. Check the credentials I was passing along to MT, nope, it has every right I can grant that account, and it’s still getting blocked.

At this point, logically, I can go no further. If I have an account with full access to the DB, and I’m getting a permission-based error, there’s really nowhere that I can move from here. Something in the MT upgrade process, and my hosting environment is not communicating correctly, and there’s nothing at all that I can do about it.

So, I try to restore my backups and go back to what I had before, hoping that, eventually, I might find a solution.

I restore everything, and I can’t login to the dashboard anymore. There’s something seriously wrong with my installation now that I cannot seem to correct, no matter how many fixes I try.

Given my history of failed upgrades, I decide that maybe now’s the time to revert to a WordPress install. I’ve always wanted to check it out, and I’m more than ready to walk away from Movable Type now, let’s see if I can get this worked out.

After much work, importing, and configuration, the new version of the site went live yesterday afternoon. In order to minimize the disruption, I actually moved the blog off the front page so I could work with it without losing that front page content, and then replaced the front page with one similar to the front page of this site. It serves as the launching off point to the various areas of the site, some of which aren’t yet listed, but will be soon, I hope.

There’s still a ton of work that needs to be done before I’ll be happy with the site, and there are some things I don’t like that I’m going to have to live with for now, like leaving the archived MT pages alone, thereby having 2 copies of all the entries up to yesterday’s, in order to not break incoming links from other blogs, and the essay and front pages not matching the blog design currently. I’m sure I’ll be putting in a lot of time and effort to get things how I envision it in my mind right now, but hopefully it’ll be worth it in the end.

In the meantime, I’m new to WordPress, what advice do you WordPress experts have for me in terms of plugins, and other must-have things?

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