How to Upgrade Smoothly from Headway 1.6.6 to 2.0.8?

Not many people can upgrade Headway automatically and smoothly from the wordpress dashboard. I was one of them, I either get the following messages or the installation took forever to install.

 

Update WordPress

Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-3.0.4.zip…

Unpacking the update…

Verifying the unpacked files…

Installing the latest version…

Could not copy file.: /public_html/wp-admin/css/media.dev.css

Installation Failed

Eventually I gave up and tried the FTP method. Surprisingly it worked well and no hiccups throughout the whole process so if you are having similar problem, you may like to try the following steps.

1. Before doing any upgrade, it is always best practice to do a backup of your blog and database.
2. Downloaded the latest version of headway. Currently it is version 2.0.8 from the membership site.
3. Unzip the folder.
4. Using your FTP program, upload the folder to “/public_html/wp-content/themes”.
   (If you do not have a copy of FTP program, you can download a free one from FileZilla).
5. Go back to the wordpress dashboard, deactivate all the plugins.
6. To play safe, copy out the contents (scripts) from “Easy Hook”, custom.css, style.css (if any change) and footer widgets (if any) to somewhere in your hard disk for backup.
7. Headway claimed it would migrate all these items while you upgrade but I didn’t have luck, all my scripts and widgets were gone after I have upgraded.
8. Once you have done the backup, go to wordpress dashboard, click on “Theme” under the “Appearance”.
9. Then activate the new theme “Headway 2.0.8”.
10. Go to the plugins and activate all of them.
11. With this, you have now completed the Headway upgrade.

Make sure you have downloaded all the Headway files (Total size: 487KB for the zip file) for the upgrade and uploaded all of them completely otherwise you may encounter unexpected errors after you activated the theme.