Blog Moved & Upgraded

By Michael Altfield, on March 30th, 2008

So, it turned out that–by some miraculus chance–the day I decide to move my blog from wordpress.com to my own server is the day after a major upgrade of wordpress is released (v2.3 to 2.5). I figured that, while I was at it, I would upgrade the server that I setup a few weeks back (I’ve been planning this move for a while now, just never really got around to finishing). I’m pretty sure I followed the installation process just fine, but when I tried to go to any page on my fresh, new site (including wp-admin/upgrade.php) I got slammed with this lovely error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function require_wp_db()

Eventually I decided “fuck the installation instructions.” I was able to install it by copying my config file and other data TO the new wordpress folder (the suggested process is the reverse: copying the new files into your current, older install).

It’s a bitch of a thing to search, too. If you search for that error (at least now, anyway) you get a bunch of popular blog sites that have since been fixed. There is no info from the webmaster or blog author as to HOW they fixed it, so I was kinda SOL.

Anyway, one of the promises of wordpress v2.5 is that TinyMCE won’t destroy your XHTML in your posts. This is GREAT news. In fact, this was one of the main reasons I switched from wordpress.com, too. In order to remedy this, you had to make a change to a config file for TinyMCE (which you didn’t have privliges to do at wordpress.com). Nevertheless, I like being able to modify my CSS–I’ll get around to actually DOING that another weekend, though…

Oh, and you might be wondering why I just didn’t have a bloody package manager do all of this work for me. Well, gentoo has banished wordpress v2.3.3 (the current version in portage at the time of writing) to a hard mask. The only pseudo explination I can find are breadcrumbs pointing to the fact that older versions of wordpress (>v2.01) had SQL injection vulnerabilities. I guess that this has scared some ricers in the gentoo community from the application for a while, but I’m looking forward to the portage tree embracing wordpress v2.5. I know that a lot of people use wordpress, and I know that portage is all about being “bleeding edge,” so–quite frankly–I’m curious as to why it isn’t already there. Oh well, maybe one day is too demanding :P.