Best Way to Upgrade from WP 2.8 (!)?

I offered a friend to help translate from English some parts of his (mostly) Hebrew install. Then he told me two things:

1) That he’s running 2.8 (he was worried about updating because he didn’t want the design to break)

and 2) That he has reason to suspect that the site is infected with a trojan horse since it gets blocked by some antiviruses.

1) What is the best way to go about upgrading? is it even feasible to start on a fresh installation and still have everything intact? including redirects? or will I have to go about it as per WP’s documentation: step by step upgrading.

2) What can be done about the trojan horse? this is why I’m contemplating a fresh install, which I know is probably not recommended.

Thank you in advance

Answers:

Thank you for visiting the Q&A section on Magenaut. Please note that all the answers may not help you solve the issue immediately. So please treat them as advisements. If you found the post helpful (or not), leave a comment & I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Method 1

The virus part is going to be off-topic, but yes a fresh install is the way to go.

What I would do to upgrade the site is:

1. Backup everything– PHP and database
2. Install the old site on a development server.
3. Before running the site, replace all of the core files with new 2.8
   ones from the archive. This will hopefully fix the suspected virus problem.
4. Then start updating release by release until you get current. Do not
   try to leap-frog over more than one or two minor releases.
5. Then you can fix anything that is broken. Unless the original site
   is running hacked core files I don’t think this step will be too
   much trouble, though you will have Notices to fix and perhaps a
   few other things.

The reason I recommend upgrading release by release, rather than trying to upgrade all at once, are:

1. Personal experience
2. I’ve seen a lot of issues over on the wordpress.org forums
   apparently caused by jumping too many releases
3. There is note in the Codex to this effect “… it’s okay to skip one
   release, but never skip TWO when upgrading.”

I have looked at the
upgrade code and, yes, it seems like WordPress should upgrade itself
over multiple releases but does not always appear to do so
correctly– perhaps issues like timeouts get in the way.

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0