Well, I cloned this weblog and tried out the newest release of WordPress on the clone. Basically I used mysqldump to save everything out in the current database, then created a new database and reloaded the contents, changing all occurrances of brainwagon.org to brainwagon.net. Then, I modified my httpd.conf file to route brainwagon.net to a different directory, installed it there, ran the upgrade.php script, and voila!

Overall, I think it went very smoothly. I like the new templates and the new templating system. It will take me a bit of work to make them look more brainwagon-y, but I didn’t really have that much going on that I really feel like I need to preserve (mostly just the color scheme and the use of floating images). I did make some really crufty modifications to support enclosures in WordPress 1.2.1, so I’ll have to do some minor bits of database surgery to get all the old enclosures inserted into the database so that they will continue to be available. I also use various spam preventing plugins, I’ll have to check to see whether these are still needed. The RSS feeds are also renamed, I’ll have to either fix that or insert appropriate rewrite rules to get them to be the same, I wouldn’t want all my subscribers to end up with broken feeds.

Overall though, I am pretty happy, and should be able to move the main site over this weekend. Congratulations to the WordPress team, it looks like a nice improvement!