Upgrading your blog platform requires some essential planning beforehand, notably backing up your database at the very least. WordPress has a handy upgrade guide which, if you follow all the steps, should result in a successful upgrade.

I do read that guide every time I upgrade. But for the last four upgrade versions of WordPress, I’ve upgraded everything with just one click.

Well, not quite. But I use a reliable service from DreamHost, my hosting provider, that literally does everything in one click. It has a snappy name - 1-Click Install.

So my upgrade path goes like this:

1. Backup the database.
2. Disable all plugins.
3. Run DreamHost 1-Click Install and wait for email confirmation that upgrade done.
4. Log in to the blog and re-enable all plugins.

The only time I’ve ever had an issue with a WP upgrade via 1-Click Install is when I hadn’t disabled plugins before doing the upgrade. (I would have had that issue however I’d done the upgrade.)

There’s lots to discover about WordPress 2.6 especially new features like Google Gears support to speed up your blog admin, and enhancements for editing posts such as wiki-like version control, word count and adding captions to images.

Now that I’ve successfully upgraded, the most crucial thing for me at the moment is getting the answer to this question - does Windows Live Writer work with WordPress 2.6?

I write all my posts and pages in WLW - by far the best offline blog editor for Windows - including this one, so this post is testing that it works.

The reason that’s an important question is that WP 2.6 introduces a significant change, one that will affect offline editors like WLW.

The change concerns XML-RPC which, in very simple terms, affects whether your offline editor can connect to your blog or not. If XML-RPC is disabled, it can’t.

For fresh installations of WP 2.6, XML-RPC is disabled by default. For upgrades, like mine, it’s enabled.

Luckily, it’s a setting that’s easy to control yourself and you’ll find it in Admin > Settings > Writing:

Both Atom and XML-RPC are topics that have been talked about a bit in recent months in relation to WordPress development.

Anyway, I’m happy with how the upgrade to WP 2.6 went. Now to test whether this post publishes ok from Windows Live Writer…

[Post-publish edit] Yes, it did publish just fine, exactly as I was expecting. That means I’m comfortable going ahead with upgrading my main blog soon.

That content is now here; everything you see in this site that was posted in 2005 and 2006 was originally in that other blog.

That blog was also a migration, from NevOn Experimental, a blog I had on TypePad.

Time to shut those down now (with a redirect in place although they now have little traffic) and move on to what’s next.

Incidentally, if you plan on setting up a WordPress blog and importing content from a different platform as I did, the import feature in recent WordPress versions makes the process simplicity itself.

As this screenshot shows, that feature supports importing content - your posts and, depending on the source platform, comments and trackbacks as well - from 14 platforms.

The WordPress Codex has easy-to-follow guidelines on what to do, including details on how to import content from more platforms.

Things still to do, Creative Commons license being an important one.

Need to decide before I do much else whether or not to import all the content from NevOn 2.0 Experimental, the tech-focused blog I wrote during 2005 and early 2006.

That’s sitting dormant as a Movable Type blog, old version 3.2 at that. I do want to keep the content but the question is - do I leave it where it is as an archive, or import all the content here?

My inclination is to import it here. That way, I have all the stuff in one place.

Sleep on that, decide tomorrow.

So I’ve decided not to spend hours on choosing a theme but to go with one and let it stick for a while. The active theme for now is Suweet 1.0 + Widgets, the one upon which I based the theme for my main blog when I did the design refresh there last August.

Now on with a bit of tweaking and then some actual content!

(Also, writing this post with Windows Live Writer so a quick test on how that works.)

Lots to do next. During the coming week.