How to painlessly upgrade to the newest version of WordPress

By Grace on Nov 4, 2007 in Wordpress stuff

I started blogging using WordPress as my blogging platform two months ago. The version I used was 2.2.2 and since then, the WordPress community has released a security update 2.3 and now the latest version is 2.3.1.

Now upgrading to the latest WordPress version requires a tremendous task of backing up your blog files, database in case anything goes wrong, you get your life blog back. To me, upgrading to a newer version when I really don’t know if there are really advantages is a scary thing. Honestly, I don’t want to wake up and tell myself, after messing up with an attempted upgrade, “I was a girl who used to have a blog until I blew it all up.”

So I had been procrastinating on the upgrade and still using 2.2.2 which is functional anyway. I am sure so many WordPress users are doing the same.

… until a plugin came to save the day! Techie Buzz released what I think is the best WP plugin around. The WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin is a plugin that automaticallyupgrades your WP version to the latest files provided by wordpress.org.

It works like a breeze. It even puts your site into maintenance mode while you do the dirt work behind the scene. Thanks Keith for the hardwork and generosity to share this wonderful plugin to the world!

*****

The latest WordPress version 2.3.1 is a bug-fix and security release for the 2.3 series. Some of the notable fixes are:

  • Tagging support for Windows Live Writer
  • A login bug that affected those with a blog address different than their WordPress  address
  • Faster taxonomy database queries, especially tag intersection queries
  • Link importer fixes

7 Comment(s)

  1. I’ll take a note of that - thanks for sharing!! Upgrading WordPress always comes with a sense of doom to me; once it didn’t work out quite right, when the ftp program quit in the middle of uploading the files. I nearly had a heart attack….

    Sabine’s last blog post..Know who you are…

    Sabine | Nov 4, 2007 | Reply

  2. Hi Sabine - yeah, it’s that “sense of doom” (you found the right words here) that kept me postponing the update. Thanks to this plugin, I am part of the updated crowd. :-)

    Grace | Nov 4, 2007 | Reply

  3. This is a great plugin. I have been thinking about trying it out for a while now. So far I didn’t, because in the end I always want to keep control about everything and all these automatic things seem a bit suspicious to me. I rather update by hand, so to speak, even if I sometimes mess up. So far it’s always been repairable. ;)

    I also have been thinking about updating to 2.3.1, but I don’t really see the benefits right now. Did you find any new functions that are really useful? I didn’t see any in the list of changes.
    Also, I’m kind of shying away from this whole tag integration business. I think, I’ll just wait another 2 or 3 months for the next few bugfix versions, before I upgrade. At the moment things are just running so smooth that I really am not in the mood to change anything right now.

    Did you have any problems with plugins that didn’t work anymore under 2.3.1?

    samulli’s last blog post..TT #28: WP Themes I like (part 2)

    samulli | Nov 4, 2007 | Reply

  4. Great post, time to do what I have to do! Magic.

    Airline News’s last blog post..Ryanair’s row with London’s Stansted Airport

    Airline News | Nov 21, 2007 | Reply

  5. Amazing plugin - just stumbled on your blog and this post caught my eye. Trying out the plugin right now and just subscribed to your RSS Feed…

    Going2Oahu’s last blog post..Hawaiian Island Cruises

    Going2Oahu | Nov 24, 2007 | Reply

  6. very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
    Idetrorce

    Idetrorce | Dec 16, 2007 | Reply

  7. I was holding up upgrading as well until I saw several popular blog were hacked :cry:

    Although my blog is not that popular, apparently some people recognizing the popularity of wordpress blog, started to hack into them and put malicious code, pointing to sites that “increases the size of body parts” sites, viag etc.

    So looks like it better to backup regularly and upgrade regularly even though it can be time consuming.

    PersonalMoneyTips | Mar 5, 2008 | Reply

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