commented out

All right! Everything seems to be in perfect working order. I’d love to say it was all easy, but that’s never case.

First, my host is making some changes to their server architecture. As a result, they’re also changing their hosting plans, which happens to mean the plan I was using is no longer available. So, upgrade number one was migrating the site over to the new hardware. Luckily, most of that work is done on their end. Nothing went wrong, and any changes I had to make were simple, and in the end there was no effect on the site’s performance. This new plan doesn’t differ much in cost, but I now have much more bandwidth and storage space at my disposal. Even better, I also have almost complete control over my PHP configuration now, which means I’m no longer burdened by some of the restrictions that were previously in place.

Second, since the site was migrating to a new server system, I figured now would be as good of a time as any to stop procrastinating and finally upgrade my installation of WordPress. The upgrade was a little complicated because not only did I neglect upgrading for far too long, but I also modified parts of my installation quite a bit. So, I ended up modifying a few core files to make them into a theme. Also, some features were almost completely rewritten with the latest release, some of which were additions that I had hacked into my old install. Because of that, I had to compare the code and figure out what I changes I no longer needed what new ones (if any) had to be made. On top of that, some of the new (and altered) stuff had to be restyled, or tweaked at the very least.

Overall, it’s been a learning experience, and I’m glad it’s finally done. I like the new features and streamlined interface of WordPress 2, so it’s well worth the effort. In the end, the downtime I had, perhaps pessimistically, expected was rather minimal. There wasn’t any actual server downtime at all, and the site itself only suffered for twenty minutes at the most.

Thank God it’s over, though.