WordPress MU

I'll keep this short and to the point. I haven't reared my head in this fantastic forum for nearly a year now, and it is far below my standards to pop up now only to ask for help, but yet that is what I am unfortunately forced to do.

What's the problem you might ask? In short, I've been a very naughty boy. My live site is currently sporting WPMU version...1.3.3. That's right. Not 2.3.3 (was there even one?) but 1.3.3.

So my question is simple. What upgrade path should I use here? I know I can grab older versions of the code from trac (can't I?), but the real issue is can I make the leap form 1.3.3 to the latest revision without missing a beat?

Are there any bumps along the way I should be weary of? Obviously I've got backups a plenty, but the less of a hitch the better.

Thanks one and all for your words of wisdom and offerings aid.

from what i've seen around this site, people have been been recommending incremental upgrades.

Just to add: I'd hold off until 2.7 comes and make one job of it since the interface went through two big design changes since your version.... It'll be easier and less confusing to your users.

Hi suleiman! I've been wondering what you've been up to! :D

If you're that far back, you should go to 1.5 them to 2.6 and then 2.7 when it comes up. They are all in trac under tags.

And I'd also recommend the above, waiting for 2.7 so the users won't get a new admin panel for a week or two and then get *another* one (which I way better IMO).

Just pick a low time, like the weekend, plan to be down 24 hours, warn users ahead of time, and be well-rested before you start. :)

Next time don't stay away so long. :P

and take regular backups of the database as you go through each install. But, hey, you know that already :)

lol...the problem is this damned database is about a gig big now, and I've been using an external mysql app for backing this bad boy up to my local machine. But that step alone easily takes a whole night. Would mysql dumps be faster?

Thanks everyone for your tips. I shall indeed wait until 2.7 comes about.

Oh, and hi Andrea!!!!

Yep, mysqldumps are fast. :)

If your database is that big, you may want to thunk about setting up replication as a real-time backup.

While I'm certainly not an expert in managing WPMU, I think I'd try to stage this on a non-production box. You're almost certainly going to have problems with plugins, and some of them may be extensive enough that you'll have to find new solutions to old problems.

If it were me, I'd copy the current installation to another box, do the upgrades there to see what breaks, take copious notes along the way, and then repeat the process on the live server.

IMO, that's better than getting 70% though an upgrade of a live site and finding that some auth module or key plugin or other dealbreaker isn't working.

jschinker, I have thought about doing this, but part of my concern is the size of the site now. Moving over a 1 gigabyte database shouldn't be too hard, but copying over all the files on the server...well that's another story.

I did think about moving it to my local machine, setting it up there, and then running the upgrades. I've also thought about doing something altogether different, and automating the export of wxr files for each and every blog to the blogs.dir folder, so there is a restore point for each blogger.

As far as I understand it exporting wxr files will leave me in a good place with regards to posts, comments, pages, and blog settings, but won't do me any good if there is actual data loss after an upgrade. I'm still mulling over the possibilities to be truthful.

You could get away with a local version without the uploads. Just expect to see some broken images.

I'm a bit iffy on the wxr exports myself. They can get wonky.