CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

After following the upgrade instructions, I had a weird error and had to completely reinstall, which has me worried about my data (yes, I did a backup).

I don't follow your process here. If you did a backup then you should have been able to roll back to the previous version. Why was reinstalling necessary?

I can understand your frustration. CiviCRM is inarguably more difficult to install and upgrade than WP.

It might be useful to step back and remember that only 3 years ago Civi didn't support WP at all, and the integration, while still not perfect, has come a very long way since then.

In many respects it is as you say - Civi is a standalone product that, in some ways, integrates with your WP site. But it still requires separate maintenance and administration.

It may also be useful to remember that Civi was first written to plug into Drupal, which is more technically challenging to install and maintain than WP, and its users tend to be professional or at least prosumer web administrators, who use tools like sftp, version control, and cli interfaces. WP, while it has its share of pros, is more geared towards the needs of hobbyists who often use cheap hosting and get by without the tools pros think of as necessities. If the only access you have to your server is FTP, installing Civi is really going to suck. If you don't have your codebase under version control, then rolling back changes can be a nightmare. If you can't use CLI tools, then upgrading Civi is a pain. You have my condolences.

But the up-side to saying something has room for improvement is envisioning those improvements actually happening. Civi's integration with WP has gone from zero to pretty good in only 3 years. Imagine where it will be in another 3. Two projects I've been advocating for are an easy installer and one-click upgrader, which I hope will get picked up this year as Google summer-of-code projects.

Want to get involved and help out?

Rob, since you did not have your code under version control (maybe this incident will have inspired you to start doing that) you'll just need to carefully put all files back where they were before you did the upgrade. File permissions may also cause problems if files are there but not readable.
Or, since things are already in a broken state, it might make sense to go ahead and try the upgrade again, get more details on the error you encounter while upgrading, and try to solve it.