Today I have been updating my newly created blog, which I’m still very passionate about, to a new version 2.7. As a very straightforward and hopeful man, I decided that I don’t need to do any backups and everything’s gonna go very smoothly.
Copied a new code and on the first screen I saw was the initial blog screen “Please enter the blog title”. That’s odd I thought but entered it again, added email address, clicked ok and received an empty screen… Tried to see the blog, but nothing was shown in the browser. Tried to go back to the previous version (2.6.5), forgot that it wouldn’t work on my database and received an error.
After that went as back as 2.6, everything was ok but the database appeared to be new and empty(!) with only one automatic blog entry. Thinking that I’ve lost all my previous blog data, I went directly to the database in my hosting provider’s PHP Admin Panel and saw that the new duplicated wordpress tables have been created. I have been accessing exactly them with 2.6 and all my old data was safe but not at that moment accessible.
So what has happened?
Somehow, the $table_prefix value in wp-config.php was not treated correctly by the previous versions of Wordpress. I have had the value “wp_ec_blog” there but all my old table had only “wp_ec” prefix. Wordpress 2.7 got installed and created a new set of tables with the prefix “wp_ec_blog” as should have happened the first time round.
That’s it!
I fixed the problem by renaming $table_prefix from ” wp_ec_blog” to “wp_ec” in order to access my old tables and the information in them. I hope that from now on everything is going to go smoothly and I won’t encounter this sort of Wordpress bugs. And I will always - always back my data up before even the minor upgrade.
