WordPress ^[1] 2.8 is out, however lots of users are facing problems with the new installations, if you are someone who is facing problems and looking for a way to downgrade or uninstall WordPress 2.8 and use WordPress 2.7.1.

Here are the steps to downgrade WordPress 2.8 to WordPress 2.7.1, I assume that you have backups of your database with you, without the database backup ^[2] do not downgrade.

Note: I am providing these instructions for your reference, I take no liability if something goes wrong with your downgrade.

Most of the problems happening in installs in WordPress 2.8 is because of incompatible plugins and themes, please make sure you switch to the default theme and disable all plugins to see if it solves your problem before you make a decision to downgrade.

The downgrade process may take about 30minutes to an hour, so be prepared to have some downtime on your blog.

Step 1: Backup your current database and store it in a safe location, if anything goes wrong you can fall back on it later, here are some instructions on backing up your database ^[3], here are some questions with relation to Backing up WordPress ^[4].

Step 2: Delete all WordPress 2.8 files, to do this login to your FTP server and delete all files in the WordPress install except for wp-content folder and the wp-config.php file, you may also want to leave out other folders that are not related to WordPress.

Step 3: Download the WordPress 2.7.1 files ^[5] and extract them to your local drive, upload all the files excluding the wp-content to your FTP server.

Step 4: Delete all the database tables in the WordPress database. Please make sure you have backups of your database before you do that.

Step 5: Restore the database backup you have before you upgraded to WordPress 2.8, you can find instructions on restoring your Database ^[6].

Step 6: Make sure everything works again and nothing is broken.

That’s it, hopefully this helps users who are seeing problems with their upgrade to WordPress 2.8.