Upgrade from 2.1.x -> 2.6 caused category names to blank & “-2-2-2-2-2…”

Still another successful way for upgrading to 2.6.1 from WP 2.2 install using XML
1. Back up SQL phpMyAdmin (always)
2. Export XML file from Admin
3. Dump DB
4. Delete 2.2 wp-admin and wp-includes folders. 5. Upload 2.6.1 wp-admin and wp-includes folders, plus 2.6.1 default theme to wp-contents folder, and upload root files with updated wp-config.php
6. Run install.php
7. Import XML files – make sure to increase max file upload to XML requirement. Sometimes when file’s big e.g. 22MB up, you have to try the import a couple of times or so.
8. Check posts in default theme. Then add the icing on the cake with theme and plugins ??
Good luck.

Looks like this has been fixed in 2.6.1, I finally found a ticket for it, #7320. Milestone’s set as 2.6.1, so upgrading directly to 2.6.1 should also work. I haven’t actually tried this myself yet, but will try to remember to report next time I do an upgrade if it works or not.

That’s good to know maestro4k. While SQL backup will always be a given, I’m now partial to good clean XML imports from 2.2 to 2.6.1 since previous two upgrades have been a breeze. Simply put, it’s like installing WP for the first time but with XML import to a very clean DB devoid of leftover tables from deactivated plugins which might not be compatible with latest WP version. No more going into DB and deleting redundant tables, at least for the moment, I’m lazy that way.

Looks like this has been fixed in 2.6.1

its not fixed in 2.6.1 — I upgraded a 2.1.x blog to 2.6.1 just the other night. it didnt work.

I never have problems with upgrades, and thought I would give it a try.

*cries*

I’m going through Archive.org, and manually pulling out all of my tags. I am then going to go into wordpress and rename all of my tags ??

Any better suggestions for the guy who didn’t backup his wordpress files?

I will pray for you. If you don’t have a SQL backup, more prayers for you ??

If you don’t backup your files & database, you’re temporarily or permanently screwed. You need to contact your host to have them restore from a tape backup… ASSUMING they 1) backup nightly, weekly, or monthly, and 2) provide that service. My host (hostgator) charges for this service.

Live and learn! Don’t make the same mistake twice.

I upgraded – and haven’t looked at my site for almost 3 months. They update weekly, so in short… There’s nothing to talk about. I was just hoping that there’s a way to recover the info from the existing sql database. I mean it knows which articles are in which categories… It’s just got the actual tag name as a 0

I recently upgraded a site from 2.2.3 to 2.3 to 2.5.1 to 2.7.1. This is from memory, but I believe running the 2.3 upgrade.php just showed a blank page. Then the 2.5 upgrade complained about WordPress database errors (stuff like “Duplicate entry ‘1’ for key 1”) but said it upgraded — and it created the taxonomy structure although did not create relationships. And the 2.5 upgrade caused a recursion loop when subsequently trying to access the backend. But the 2.7.1 straightened that out, although relationships were still missing.

So, after a bit of spelunking around in the term tables, I put together the following script:

#! /bin/sh

awk '/INSERT INTO wp_post2cat/ { print $6 + 0, $7 + 0 }' $1 \
  | sort -n \
  | awk '{ printf \
        "INSERT INTO wp_term_relationships VALUES (%d,%d,0);\n" \
        "UPDATE wp_term_taxonomy SET count = count + 1 WHERE term_id = %d;\n", \
      $1, $2, $2; }'

Basically, all that was missing was a row in relationships that linked a post (object_id) to a category (term_id). (You also need to bump the count for that term_id.) So if you have a SQL dump from before the upgrade attempt, you can feed it to the above script, save the output to a file and feed that back into mysql.