How To Upgrade Your WordPress Installation - The Harmless Geek Way
WordPress follows the Open Source policy of release early, release often. While this is a pretty good thing - you get fast releases to security exploits and loads of new features - but updating can be a rather problem, especially so if its something as important as your site’s CMS.
Fortunately Keith D’Souza has written a VERY NEAT plugin - WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin which makes it a painless affair to upgrade your WordPress installation. WordPress Automatic Upgrade updates WordPress installation in a step by step manner.
- If your WordPress installation is dated, then a message prompting you to update your installation.
- On clicking Upgrade, you are prompted to backup the existing installation files(or skip it).
- Next, you are prompted to backup the database(or again, skip it)
- Next, the plugin automatically fetches the newest version of WordPress via ftp from WordPress.org
- Your blog goes into maintenance mode
- De-activates all active plugins and remembers it.
- WordPress files are upgraded.
- Gives you a link that will open in a new window to upgrade installation.
- Re-activates the plugins, and puts your blog out of maintanance mode.
IF pressing next all these times sounds tedious(or if you’re lazy) there’s an automatic mode which does all these things without prompting you for it.
This is definitely a must-have and recommended plugin for WordPress.
Download WordPress Automatic Upgrade from here.
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September 10th, 2008 at 1:57 am
Has the upgrade plugin always worked for you? About 25% of the time I find that something goes wrong and I end up upgrading manually anyway. I actually prefer doing a manual upgrade.
September 10th, 2008 at 9:39 am
Kim - The WPAU plugin has always worked for us. We use it on Harmless Geek and on our personal blogs as well. =)
September 10th, 2008 at 10:39 am
Hi Kim,
The plugin works most of the time, EXCEPT for the occasion when you choose NOT to perform a backup of your existing installation. In this case, after fetching the plugin, while trying to unzip you might get an fopen error. I’ve informed the author of the plugin of this bug, it should be fixed soon.
September 10th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
@Kim,
It worked flawlessly for me too.
September 11th, 2008 at 5:37 am
@Sathya - Someone told me the opposite today - that it is better to backup manually or with the backup plugin and to skip those steps when using the auto-upgrade plugin …