Yesterday I update my blogging platform to WordPress 3.3. I took a few days to get round to it, during which I made backups and planned my strategy, but in the end it was fairly painless. I worked on my local copies of the file, preserving my content and copying across the key details of the config file, uploaded to the server and, on returning to the site, was able to quickly log in and press the button to painlessly perform the final database upgrade.

Empowered by my success, I decided to quickly squeeze in an update on the St Clement’s website, which also runs on WordPress. I took the same steps but, on logging in, was greeted with the screen that appears on a brand new install. I had a working site but none of the existing content! It didn’t help that at about that time my dinner guest arrived, so I had to down tools and leave it in a broken state for a few hours.

After our guest had gone, I returned to fiddling. This weekend is the start of our run of Christmas services so, at very least, I had to get information about those online. I did have backups but I wanted to try and understand the problem first. Wiping the decks without figuring out the cause of the problem can make matters worse or at least mean you end up back at the same dead end.

It turned out to be a simple prefix setting in the config file. When I first set up the site on WordPress, it was running alongside my own blog, so I had to assign a distinct table prefix to avoid problems. All I had to do to fix things was correct two characters and everything was back to normal. Ah well. Almost perfect!