Please bear in mind that this is my very own personal experience. Try this at your own risk!

Situation:
Manually installed wordpress on my hosting account, getting tired of upgrading every new version. Decided to switch to Fantastico install, let it handle the upgrades.

Solution:
You must have these:

1. A Cpanel hosting account with Fantastico bundled.
2. A archiving tool(to zip your files).
3. A FTP program(to upload big files).

Step 1: Backup everything.
I seriously mean EVERYTHING. Download a home directory backup, and a Mysql database backup from your cpanel to local computer. Extract the files to see everything is in place(compare to your current hosting account home directory).

Step 2: Purge everything.
Delete everything starts with wp* inside your wordpress directory on the server. For me it is the public_html directory, it has only 1 directory called cgi-bin by default.

Delete your old mysql database for wordpress as well. Please make sure you have all the backups on your local computer.

Step 3: Install a fresh Wordpress with Fantastico.
Pretty standard procedures here. At the end you will get a fresh wordpress at your desired location, for me it’s the webroot. You don’t need to actually login to admin area to do anything yet. Let’s get back the old data first.

Step 4: Restore all old data
4.1 Database
You should have an old database backup with you. Extract it and you will get a file xx.sql. For me it’s wp.sql, which I named the database last time.

Now go to your cpanel, inside ‘Mysql Database’, there’s a link at the bottom for you login to phpMyadmin. Inside phpMyadmin, on the left shows the available databases under your account.

If you removed the old database already, you should see only one on the list which has the name ‘wrdp1‘. This is default database name for new wordpress installed by Fantastico.

Go inside wrdp1 database and choose to import, just upload the old wp.sql file and wait. After it’s done, there will be message telling you how many queries have been made.

Leave phpMyadmin now since the database has been imported.

4.2 Files
Now check the backup you have downloaded, inside wordpress folder you should have your old wp-content folder. You should only take care of 3 things:

1. Upload everything in ‘wp-content/plugins‘ to your fresh installed wordpress, the directory structure should be exactly the same. Do not upload ‘akismet’ and ‘hello.php’
2. Upload everything in ‘wp-content/themes‘ to your fresh installed wordpress. Do not upload ‘classic’ and ‘default’.
3. Upload everything in ‘wp-content/uploads‘ to your fresh installed wordpress.

Step 5: Run the upgrade script
Open browser and go to yourdomain.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php

Step 6: You are done
Things should be okay now, you should be able to login to admin area and your front end.

Again I must stress that this is not a tutorial, it is just my personal experience. If you have previously manual install wordpress on your own, you should pretty much have a clue about I am writing here.

Result:
You are looking at my blog isn’t it? The only uncertainty is……I am not sure whether can Fantastico upgrade the next version for me or not!

Happy upgrading anyway! Feedbacks are appreciated.

Okay since I’m already here, allow me to share with you something that you probably already knew.

• CodeIgniter. CI, Code Igniter has been my all time favorite for the past year. It is a PHP Framework that does wonders. Any php web programmer should seriously have a look.
• Firefox3, this browser is storming the Internet. Regardless of the browser engine itself, the availability of countless Add-ons really makes everyone’s life easier.
• Wordpress simply rocks. Endless surprises after I upgraded it to the latest 2.6.2 version. The new plugins management is a godsend, plus many other new features. This is why I am still publishing this blog post actually. I would like to test this version.
• GTA4. Grand Theft Auto 4. It is everywhere! I am waiting patiently for its PC version.

That’s all for now, I wish I will be able to write more in the coming days. There are many things I would still like to talk about!

I would also like to take this chance to introduce you guys a plugin which I have been watching closely, NOT YET installed. WordPress Automatic Upgrade is a plugin brought to you by techie-buzz.com, it will upgrade your wordpress blog automatically. Including download the archive to your web space, replace old files, setting file permissions and more.

As I’ve said I do not use this plugin yet, let’s wait and see. I have a very high expectation on this.

P/S: Please notify me if you find any error after this upgrade.

• Remote shell injection in PHPMailer
• Remote SQL injection in XML-RPC
• Unescaped attribute in default theme

Along with other bugs fixed.

• Atom feed validation fixes
• XML-RPC fixes
• Widget backward compatibility fixes
• Widget layout fixes for IE7
• Page and Text Widget improvements

For more details, please refer to this page.

While all other browsers, namely Firefox, Opera, Konquerer, and even IE7 are displaying the boxes correctly, IE 6 and prior are not. It is a known fact that Microsoft has been shipping defected Internet Explorer(prior to IE 7) together with their operating system. Many of you just do not know that.

I know it is a bad practice to neglect the user experience in website design and development, but please, just for once, I’m going to let it pass on this blog. I am not responsible for the use of any defected software, how much I wish I can tell this to clients of other projects I’m dealing with. Unfortunately, I give in everytime. Thanks to Microsoft, every web designer/developer will have to deal with it.

CSS IE hacks for alpha png, layers, margins, go and ask around. You will get more answers than I can tell you here. So, as this blog is meant to tell you more about Open Source Software(at least I see it this way), please get yourself Firefox or something else. I have a button on the sidebar for you to download Firefox, and a handful of Firefox Extention posts for you to read.

Also, I’m dedicating this post to countless of web designers/developers out there, for all the sufferings they have endured.

I have just updated WordPress to version 2.2, this is a mandatory upgrade which means the 2.1.X branch will not be continued. Bloggers, you might want to upgrade your WordPress blog as soon as you can because this version consists of 244 bugs fixed.

New features including:

1. WordPress Widgets
   Drag and drop your sidebar items, as simple as that. It was available as a plugin, now being included in the core code.
2. Full Atom support
   Now besides RSS, you have another way to serve your blog feeds.
3. new Blogger importer
   Google Blogger full import. If you have a blogger.com account, and would like to switch to WordPress, you can keep all your posts and comments without any hassle.
4. Infinite comment stream
   This might sounds complicated. Actually it is just an AJAX feature that lets you moderate your blog’s comments with simpler way, as in you will always have 20 Items on the same page after you make some deletes.

For more features listing, please check out WordPress Release Page. Also, while we all enjoy using WordPress so much, see what the contributing author Matthew Mullenweg has to say in his blog.

Anyway, I’m now stucked with Celcom’s 3G Plan. Not an ideal connection for heavy data user like me, even loading this blog is at “snail” speed. Better to save my posts in drafts on my local drive. Connection is my life, this is a recognized fact among friends.

After these few days of hard work(moving furnitures here and there), I started to worry about my HEALTH. I seriously need some fixes, offline stuff, can’t go on like this.

I will not list out my criteria here, you are the judge of yourself, but it’s strictly blog only please. Someone out there, please enlighten this poor soul here. Leave your comment with your blog URL or contact me with the contact form.

Lastly, spammers, GO A W A Y.

This is my first blog entry with Internet Explorer 7, on Windows XP Professional. Got this IBM T-42 laptop sometime ago from a friend, I think I’ll let it stay the way it is, don’t really have the urge to install linux on it.

So, please be ready for a full load of updates in this blog, I’m back in action again!