It’s also nice when there is a helpful community of users to lean on!

PS I added that subscribe-to-comments plug-in that you recommended. I was running out of time then so I may have missed something: where did you add the “subscribe w/o commenting” bit? TIA!

My real mistake was not to make a backup. I certainly lucked out in the end!

But about upgrading, uhm, it’s not a weekend task. People try to scare you with going into PHP admin and backing up database tables and deleting wp-admin folder and files but not wp-config and not anything under wp-include/cache and deleting first then uploading the new etc. and so on….

Don’t get concerned with that, because you probably installed your blog recently. If you used Fantastico to install it, you can use Fantastico to also upgrade it. Basically, just follow these three steps if you have cPanel:

1. In cPanel, look for the Back Up icon. Back up your system. It is just a matter of clicking a couple of links there.

2. In WordPress, deactivate your plugins (although the only reason you do this, apparently, is that if some are incompatible, your blog won’t look broken after upgrading).

3. In cPanel, go into Fantastico > WordPress and find where you installed your blog. You’ll probably see a little link next to it that says “upgrade to 2.1.” You click that and you’re done.

I don’t know why Lorelle, in her post on upgrading WordPress, doesn’t mention the Fantastic method of upgrading.

Hey, one more thing, Lorelle is so cool that you’ll see her posts appear in your WP dashboard. There’s a lot of useful stuff that appears there.

“I blindly overwrote my existing files with the 2.1 source without creating backups”

do you mean you overwrote your wp-content folder and wp-config files?

I delete the old folders first prior to uploading the new. Luckily I didn’t have problems, but I ran backups first just in case.

Having performed a couple of problem-free updates in the past few weeks I was feeling overly comfortable with the procedure. I blindly overwrote my existing files with the 2.1 source without creating backups. I tried upgrade.php and got an error. I tried removing my plugins but got the same error.

At this point I manually backed up the mysql database, backed up the entire blog directory, and tried starting from scratch. I tried upgrade.php but no prior version was recognized. I tried executing the default index.php which prompted me to create a new blog. I did the first step of specifying the database location and credentials and attempted to continue to step 2, but WP reported that data existed and I must delete it to start a new blog.

For the heck of it, I visited my root URL (at index.php) again and my blog was there, sans theme and plugins! PHEW!!! It took me 5 minutes to upload and activate everything and all was well again.

To anyone trying to update to 2.1, RTFM!!!!! From what I can tell, 2 simple steps (make a backup, disable plugins) could have saved me a lot of headaches and heartaches!