This morning I was pleased to find that a new version of WordPress (2.8) was out and it was time to upgrade. One of the nice things about WP is the automatic upgrade option, which basically means you backup your site, click upgrade, and you’re done.

Well it didn’t go quite that smooth this time, and I received an error that WP couldn’t copy the wp-comments-post.php file. I could have just upgraded the old fashioned way, but decided to investigate further. Here’s what I did to fix it:

1. Logged into my server via ftp
2. Located the upgrade files in wp-content/upgrade
3. Tried to delete the ‘core’ directory and all its contents (these, I believe are the upgrade files)
4. I was denied permission to delete these files (on my own server no less), so I used Terminal (on a mac) to ssh into the server and delete the ‘core’ directory.
5. Re-ran the upgrade from within WP, and everything went smoothly.

Now it’s time to go and poke around the new version!