There have been many posts here on upgrading production sites wher a mis-step or upload glitch can mean the difference between making money and making enemies.
One solution is to make a mirror site in a subdomain (http://mirror.domain.com) or in a subdirectory (http://domain.com/mirror). In the mirror ste, in Options > Privacy, set it so that the search engines don't crawl the site. This is important to avoid duplicate content. Copy your existing database and upload nto the newly created database.
Do all of your development work on the new "mirror" site to be sure everything works. When you are satisfied, replicate the changes in your main site.
You should have a better idea of problems, and the solution won't require a frantic "call for help" that results when your production site goes down.
This procedure does require some additional work, but the tradeoff in panic attacks might offset that somewhat.
It would be great if this subject was posted in great detail. It's not straight forward for someone who's never done it, and almost every helpful post I've read still skips over important details.
Techies know how to's but non-techies don't. Exact and complete step by step instructions are needed to set up another site, copy a data base, etc. We would like to do but don't know how to do. This is a new world for us.
And also make sure you deactivate all non-semipro plugins that you may be using before you upgrade.
The update from the 5.0 series to 5.5 meshes wp 2.5 with semiologic and most of the outside plugins you maybe using may not be compatible with wp2.5, causing lots of problems and headaches when you upgrade.
So just to be safe deactivate them. Then you can go thru them one by one.
I have a question on how to copy the existing database to the mirror. Here are the steps I went through:
1) load Sem 5.5 RC3 into subdomain. 2) create new database 3) run WP install
4) ?? When I tried to export all the databases from 4.2.7 to the newly created wordpress database I get errors on the import because the database struction on some of the existing databases are not the same. A quick step by step on how to create the mirror site would be helpful.
Not to be a weenie, but the other alternative would be to have a feature that works 100% of the time instead of (in my case) 60%. I am manuually updating my site (again). Is there something we should be doing (turning off plugins?). As this is a "wizard" i'm assuming its doing everything right. All I do is click next. If there is someting I should be doing before running the wizard, please let me know (besides recreating my site). Are there any plans to reporduce the help topics that went missing when WP went to 2.51? Is the safest thing to do just manually upgrade? Sure it might take more time than the wizard, but if there is a glitch I end up spending more time than if I had manually upgraded.