Somtime ago, I upgraded WordPress from version 1.5 to 2.x. The official instructions are simple and clear. Basically the steps include backing up your databases and files, downloading and extracting the new Wordpress package and running the Wordpress upgrade program via your browser.

However, it didn’t work for me.

Running upgrade.php seemed to work and even gave me a success message. Clicking on the “Have fun” (or something like that) link, however resulted in: “It doesn’t look like you’ve installed WP yet. Try running install.php.”

Well, I tried that too and of course it said that WordPress was already installed. Quite rightly so. A possible reason for the above problem is addressed in the Installation FAQ and is concerned with administrative capabilities. However that wasn’t the reason for me.

A little poking around in the scripts showed that a check in the file wp-settings.php was resulting in the problem. After that, a peek into the MySQL database showed that in the table sw_options, for the condition, option_name = siteurl, the option_value was blank. I set that to “http://sharadware.com” (my weblog’s URL) and things worked fine.

Without exploring the why and how in too much detail, I’m posting this in the hope that it may be of use to someone else to upgrade and continue using WordPress - a great piece of software.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 3rd, 2006 at 2:10 pm and is filed under Internet, Linux, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.