Spence Green

For several months now I have been unable to automatically update WordPress. Then, this afternoon, I found that I could no longer update the site manually. A quick glance at the 2.9.1 release notes revealed the problem:

Requires MySQL 4.1.2 or greater (old requirement was 4.0).

A few searches revealed that many other 1&1 users have encountered the same issue, which I resolved by making two administrative changes:

1. Ensure that WordPress is running on php5 by adding a line to .htaccess in the WordPress root directory.
2. Migrate the WordPress database to MySQL 5.0. I followed this set of instructions exactly.