Tonight I upgraded to WordPress 2.1. The upgrade went smoothly, except for one tiny little part.
I thought I had backed up everything I needed for the transition. When I upgrade my WordPress installation, I follow a pretty simple process, although I wouldn’t recommend it. Always follow the upgrade instructions at the WordPress site.
My upgrade goes something like this.
1.) Delete the old files, except the ones that need to be backed up (any themes, plugins, configuration files, etc., as listed in the official upgrade instructions.
2.) Upload the newly downloaded files along with the old files I had backed up.
Tonight I forget to back up all of my theme files. These files control the look of the blog. To my horror, after my successful upgrade, I saw the default theme on the blog. I started to go into panic mode.
Then along comes Google. I used the Google cache of my blog to find the missing pieces of HTML I needed. I would have been completely lost without this information. It would have taken a few days to get everything the way I wanted it. After getting the missing HTML, I downloaded the old theme I was using (Almost Spring by Rebecca Wei, and with the HTML I found in the cached page, patched the theme back to the way it used to be.
After about 30 minutes or so, the blog was back up and looking the way it was supposed to.
So when you upgrade, be careful, and follow ALL of the instructions. Don’t get bit like I did.