Upgrade 3.5.1 to 3.9.1 error

As you have such an old version of WordPress, you will need to carry out a series of smaller manual upgrades. See Upgrading_WordPress_Extended for the full details.

Hello ESMI

Thank you for your response and I have reviewed the document you have referenced. I was quite surprised to read your discription of my WordPress version as “old” installed 13 months ago and that it could be such a protracted task list to upgrade considering WordPress is noted for the 20 minute initial install. It would appear that the upgrade will take quite a bit longer than 20 minutes.
Another major surprise was to learn that the update process which is supposed to be a single click process does not work if you go beyond 2 version increments so perhaps the option shold be grayed out once the update downloaded is checked against the existing version or at least an error trap written for the upgrade process so that it cross checks the versions and if more than 2 provides the user trying to upgrade a more meaningful notice of what is causing the problem. In general WordPress should more explicitly advise the consequences of falling behind in upgrades if the process of steping over 2 increments is so fraught with risk.

I have the following queries from the instruction list you referenced.

Step 9 of the overview says “run the upgrade program” but does not say how or where this is launched?

The section suggesting upgrading incrementally is confusing saying U/G 2.5 to 2.7, then 2.9 and finally 3.9.1, I presume two steps each in between and not jumping from 2.9 to 3.9.1. If this is the case I presume I must upgrade from 3.5.1 to 1st 3.7.1 and then 3.9.1 Is this correct?

In Step 3 – what .SQL files editor should I use as none is mentioned and I have no idea what way I can review .SQL files from the instruction as written.

Finally when I installed WordPress initially on my own LAMP server I found it did not set the file permissions on the folders properly possibly because I extracted the files from the zip and moved them to the www/WordPress folder rather than unzipping them directly to their final destination. I did it this way because I had other web sites in the www folder that I did not want over written. The lose way the installation document was written meant I could not decypher for sure whether the WordPress folder was contained within the zip structure or I had to extract into a pre created WordPress folder. The consequence was, following the file copy I was unabe to run the installation or it would fail due to permissions problem (not at all obvious from the error shown) so my process was many hours / days longer than the 20 minute install much touted. This was all caused because the installation instructions did not list a simple explicit path to its expected installation destination but instead has a reference to Web Server Root or something to that effect from memory

As these is nothing in the instruction set that warns against copying files rather than zipping the archive contents, which seems to preserve permission on folder within the archive folder structure, Am I open to the same problem coming back when following copying the files I am unable to run the install?

Can you please clarify as I do not want to break my sites due to permissions problems again. Again the instruction sheet is somewhat vague about where you should run the unzip from. I have read “parallel to your current WordPres directory” but once again no complete PATH example? What is “parallel” to /var/www/Wordpress?

Hi

Can we have clarification about the required directory structure and permissions as requested? What is the proper path to the wordpress root?

Can we have clarification about the required directory structure and permissions as requested?

All folders should be 755 and all files 644.

What is the proper path to the wordpress root?

That depends upon where you installed WordPress on the domain in the first place.

Hello TonyR63

I came to the same here… having a WordPress site in 3.5.1 and wanted to update it to latest 3.9.1 . Thanks to your post above, I didn’t do the auto upgrade in the admin, lol.

What I did was download 3.7, transfer files by ftp (all, except wp-content of course), visit my url for /wp-admin/upgrade.php (got a database upgrade there) and the site was in 3.7 then

So as you can guess, after this first step, I than ran the auto update in the admin, and I am at 3.9.1 today

Hope my post can help others having 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, or even 3.8 maybe.
Old version can be found here
https://www.ads-software.com/download/release-archive/

Hello

Thanks to everyone who have provided assistance which was very helpful and most appreciated.

I manually upgraded from 3.5.1 to 3.7.1 and then again from 3.7.1 to 3.9.1 by downloading and copying files which appears to have worked, thankfully. I had no confidence that I would not have to back out and restore my data due to imbiguities in the documents I was referred to
For example, and for the benefit of others, I found I did NOT have the file structure exactly as depicted in the manual upgrade document that can be reviewed here:

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Upgrading_WordPress_Extended

Here is what the document states:

Delete the old WordPress files on your site, but DO NOT DELETE

wp-config.php file;
wp-content folder; Special Exception: the wp-content/cache and the wp-content/plugins/widgets folders should be deleted.
wp-images folder;
wp-includes/languages/ folder–if you are using a language file do not delete that folder;
.htaccess file–if you have added custom rules to your .htaccess, do not delete it;
robots.txt file–if your blog lives in the root of your site (ie. the blog is the site) and you have created such a file, do not delete it.

I did not have a /wp-content/cache nor did I have a /wp-content/plugins/widgets in fact just checking I see the upgraded site still does not have this structure so the docunment I was to relay on is not applicapable to my installation so you could imagine how I felt about deleting and copying over folders not being certain about what i needed to retain.

Is the document inaccurate as it must be becuase my installation has never been altered?

Also the instruction to not delete the wp-images folder could be be understood as there is no wp-images folder in my installation or the original 3.5.1 archive downloaded from Codex so where did they get this instruction from?

In a previous post I feedback the importance in providing full paths to files that are to be over written or deleted however I got a rsponse that it depends on the location of installation however that does not prevent the documents have an example of a typical path that one could compare to their own installation and workout the contextual varience?

In addition regardles of where the root of your site resides the structure of the /WordPress/.. could be fully qualified makeing it more likely that users will not accidentally copy files to the wrong location? Surely this would enhance the documentation greatly with very little effort?

The WordPress platform is excellent however the documentation is very poor and it should be possible provide installation programes that can conduct accumulatory updates. Restricting people to copying over files manually does not do the excellent platform justice and should be avoided.

Hello

Further the post above I have again tried to update my WordPress site using the auto update feature, which has once again failed. I have never seen this work on any site! I was told before that the reason it failed 2 months ago was because I was trying to jump too many versions however on this occasion this is not the case as I am upgrading from 3.9.1 to 3.9.2.

I cannot understand when I have complete access to my home site why I must again look at running a complex manual upgrade process of copying over files. Why is the WordPress update so problematic and why is this such a persistent problem?

Can you suggest what I need to do to make this work as designed?

I have also been notified in my dashboard that 7 of my plugins have updates however a single one would update giving an error “Could not remove the old plugin” Is there a reason for this error and can it be avoided?

Kind Regards

Anthony