I had one long weekend of frustration. One of my favorite online store site packages, X-cart, was resisting my efforts to run some upgrade scripts to move to the newest version of the software. No matter what I did, X-cart did not see the upgrade package to move from version 4.0.17 to version 4.0.18. I changed every file permission I could think of, moved files all around, and still nothing.

I finally had to start pulling apart the code of the upgrader and the software to figure out why it wasn’t working. After a ton of time and testing I finally discovered the issue: A bug in the upgrade code for this patch was preventing X-cart from seeing the patch as valid. It turns out the coders had only set it to search for the database string for the version as 4.0.17, where if you had ever upgraded the program the string was listed as 4.0.17gold_upgrade…..so the patch would never be visible. To correct this issue you had to edit the database entry in the config table to simply list the current version as the number.

This reminded me of how simple in general it is to upgrade WordPress. Simply overwrite the default files with the new ones and run one simple database upgrade script and you’re done. With WordPress 2.3 being released very soon it’s good that this part of WordPress is easy. Now, making sure your theme and plugins don’t break due to the database changes they’ve done, now that’s not going to be easy…..