WordPress 3.3 Let’s Do IT

I’ve now updated the big guns in my arsenal of WordPress sites.  The only one that had any difficulty at all was the Lab.  I had a custom menu disappear from the menu editor.  It still existed, and worked on site, but I couldn’t view or edit the menu.

It was simple, I rebuilt the menu in about 5 minutes and activated it for the sub-nav below the header image.  This experience caused a few hours of research on how to backup just the custom menus.  Not much out there on them.  A great plugin would be the ability to export and import custom menus.

I found one small post mentioning a conflict with All-In-One-SEO with custom menus causing them to disappear on update.  But I couldn’t verify this and I updated a few small sites with it still activated and had no difficulty.

The big guns have several custom menus and up to 70 pages in each.  I didn’t want to rebuild those menus.  Therefore here is what I did:

1. Backed up the entire database using SQLAdmin Export function.  I did the entire database and just the options table (that’s where the menus reside).
2. I updated all plugins
3. Updated the theme files
4. Deactivated all plugins
5. Ran the upgrade
6. Reactivated all plugins

Everything went of without a hitch.  All menus are there and functioning.

Take the recommended precautions (and don’t shortcut the process this time by leaving the plugins activated) and everything should upgrade without a hitch

When you reactivate the plugins, make sure you check your site.  If it doesn’t look right, deactivate the plugins again and start adding them back one at a time.