bernardborealis

I’ve seen this issue before, too, but I’ve always been able to fix it by uninstalling all plugins and preparing the site as Simple Scripts suggests, then it should complete the upgrade properly.

This post is a bit old, but I’ll comment anyway. If you installed wordpress with Bluehost, you probably used the Fantastico installer, which can have its own issues at times. While Bluehost does still offer Fantastico, it now offers a program called Simple Scripts which installs wordpress with everything you need. The newer versions of WordPress work splendidly with Simple Scripts and you won’t have to worry about any of the problems mentioned above.

You have to make sure that the database you are importing the .sql file into is empty or phpmyadmin won’t let you import into it. Once you’ve emptied the database, you should be able to import your .sql file, as long as it isn’t too large. If it is too large, the great thing about Bluehost is they allow you to use ssh access so you can still import it using ssh. (Though it is a little more complicated) Here’s a link I found that could help you with that: https://helpdesk.bluehost.com/kb/index.php?x=&mod_id=2&id=126

If you have your wordpress key from your wordpress.com account, it should work great on Bluehost. If it isn’t, make sure that your version of Akismet is up to date.

Thanks for talking to yourself! Because it helped me out! I wasn’t careful with my upgrade and ended up with the same problems.

bump.
Is there a plugin which allows me to edit the widget-built sidebars?

It is quite likely a setting within the theme itself, though I’m not sure. What happens if you backup the default theme somewhere else(in case something happens you can restore it) and then remove it, will the chosen theme still go away?

That should be somewhere in your stylesheet. You would need to locate the section related to your sidebar and edit the stylesheet to display it the way you want.
eg. My sidebar looks something like this:
/*—:[ sidebar styles ]:—*/

ul.sidebar_list { list-style: none; }

h2 { font-weight: bold; font-size: 1.077em; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0 0 0.8em 0; padding: 0.4em 2px; border-top: 3px solid #000; background: url(”) 0 100% repeat-x; }

You can see from this what is set for the h2 and you can change the font, background image, size, etc.

Untar is like unzip, you may need winrar or another program to untar it if your current zip program won’t allow you to extract it. There should be a backup file called .backup.1207754186.tgz. Files beginning with a . are hidden files so if you don’t see it you will need to turn on hidden files. Then you empty your database and import the backup database into it. If you do not have a .backup… etc. file, then did you make a backup of the database personally before you upgraded? Upgrades and things like that aren’t always perfect so it is best to back things up before you undertake tasks like that for future information.