Notes on upgrading to WordPress 3.0 on 1and1

Normally I’d wait until at least the x.01 release of a new WordPress before upgrading. But this time I wanted to try the new WordPress soon after the final 3.0 version was out. I still waited a few days before installing it to let other people discover and fix any initial problems.

Problems and fixes

My wait paid off as a number of people who were using the same hosting company as me (1and1) found that the upgrade was failing with a ‘Fatal error: Allowed memory size of xxxxxxxx bytes exhausted’.

The fix for this problem is very simple – increase the allowed memory size, either by adding a php.ini , updating the wp-config.php, or for those who could wait a few days for an easier fix, by installing the Memory Bump plugin.

I installed Memory Bump, and went through all my usual WordPress backup steps, before attempting the install.

I pressed the Upgrade button, WordPress did something for about a minute and then I got this error message:

Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-3.0.zip.
Download failed.: Operation timed out after 60 seconds with 1023460
bytes received
Installation Failed

Not to panic though, this error is just saying that WordPress didn’t manage to download the new install package before its 60 second timeout. I pressed the button again, and this time it worked!

Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-3.0.zip.
Unpacking the update.
Verifying the unpacked files…
Installing the latest version…
Upgrading database…
WordPress upgraded successfully

New themes

The reason I wanted to upgrade as soon as possible was so that I could give reviewmylife a new theme. The old Kubrick theme was getting a bit old.

old reviewmylife blog

After a bit of searching and experimenting I found the News Magazine Theme 640 which I have now switched to.

new reviewmylife blog

One word of advice if you are switching themes – if you swap to a new one, and then back to the previous you might find that all your widgets have been set to inactive. You’ll have to re-add them again.

A second piece of advice is to keep any caching plugin you might have disabled whilst you play about with new themes and theme settings. This will make sure that you always see the latest generated pages, and not older cached ones. Don’t forget to turn the caching back on afterwards!

A later error

Whilst modifying one of my plugins I got this error on trying to activate it.

The plugin generated 3 characters of unexpected output during
activation. If you notice “headers already sent” messages, 
problems with syndication feeds or other issues, try deactivating
or removing this plugin.

There are many possible causes, but in my case the problem was down to having opened the .php in Notepad and accidently saving it as UTF-8 instead of ANSI. I re-saved it as ANSI and it worked again.

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