I created my blog/photo site using CE2 decades ago. I then updated to Backlight, and then BL2. My basic site then remained untouched, other than adding new blog posts, for the last several years. I have now been retired for 10 years, and can’t remember the magic I used to get it all together Way Back When…
Yesterday I went to make some changes, so took the plunge and updated to BL5. The installation seemed to run fine, the installer appeared to update all the modules properly. I went to each page in Designer, opened and saved, to update databases.
Now my blog is totally broken. My website shows my BL menus and the galleries behind those menus. The main page only shows the ‘Welcome’ and ‘Lorem ipsum’ text though.
Wordpress still shows all my posts, and all my blog media, so it hasn’t been lost. The connection has just been broken, and I can’t figure out how to reconnect and show my blog posts, search fields, etc again…?
Site is: www.MindStormPhoto.com
Backlight has nothing to do with your Wordpress site, doesn’t care about your Wordpress at all.
How did you perform the upgrade?
Like, did you download the installer and copy files into your webspace and clobber your Wordpress files? Because if so, you shouldn’t have done that.
That’s what it sounds like you did.
To upgrade from Backlight 2 to Backlight 5, you should simply have accessed the Backlight Modules page and pressed the button to update, like we show in all of our upgrade videos, that we definitely link to in our blog posts and newsletters. That would have upgraded Backlight “in place”, preserving whatever ancillary software you have sharing the space.
If this is the problem, then the solution is to go get the original index.php and .htaccess files from a Wordpress ZIP file, and copy them back to the root of your website.
I followed the instructions found here – Upgrading | Backlight
That involved my removing some files by ftp, then copying the new files on the site, and then running the installer, which ran through a bunch of lines rapidly saying this-and-that module had been successfully updated.
Those two files (index.php and .htaccess) were removed in that process, and replaced with the ones in the BL package, as that document referenced above stated.
Sounds like I need to recover that old pair of files and restore them? (I used Dropbox Backup Pro for backups, and those don’t seem usable now for an unknown reason… 
)
FIXED!
I found an older version of the access and index files, and put them in the WordPress home folder. That made things work again.
I lost some of my customization, because I was using “classic widgets” that are no longer supported, but I can rebuild that using the new "block widgets?
Thanks for your quick reply, which included the hint needed for me to get back to life again !
There is a WordPress plugin to restore the classic widgets
Note the headline on that page, “Upgrade from Backlight 1.x”, indicates those instructions are specifically for upgrading from Backlight 1.
For upgrades from Backlight 2 and above, you should have followed the link to this page.
And that would have included a link to this short video:
Though I’ve also been sending this updated, more in-depth video in more recent announcements:
Please familiarize yourself with the process in these videos, as it’s the way you should be upgrading Backlight basically forever forward.
