A new version of WordPress was released last night. They’re up to 2.6 which offers some nifty new features, as seen in this video created by WordPress.
While it may seem that WordPress releases upgrades every week, it’s important to install them. Hackers have made sport of seeking out securty holes in WordPress, and the longer you wait to patch them the more likely you are to be hacked. I’ve seen it, and it ain’t pretty. If you’re running a version of WordPress prior to 2.5.1, upgrade NOW.
If you’re using a self-hosted version of WordPress (in other words, you aren’t hosted at wordpress.com, in which case none of this applies to you, thanks for stopping by and have a great day!) there are a few ways to deal with upgrades.
- Contact someone (like me!) who will take care of your upgrade for you for a fee. Or maybe you have a generous friend who knows how to upgrade.
- Use Fantastico (via cPanel) or some other one step upgrade script offered by your webhost (not all hosts offer this, you may have to contact your host to find out what your options might be.)
- Use the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin.
- Manually upgrade yourself via FTP.
Each of these options has it’s pros and cons.
Hiring someone is a good solution if you have more money than time, but be aware that you need to hand over the keys (passwords) to your site, so make sure you trust that person completely. If a friend offers to help be sure that friend has experience with upgrading WordPress. It would be a stupid thing to ruin a friendship over, right?
Fantastico and other one-step upgrades are quick and easy, but if your site is highly customized you risk losing some of the customizations. It sometimes takes awhile for the lastest version of WordPress to become available (for example at this writing version 2.6 is not available via Fantastico.) Also if something goes wrong your timesaver just could have added hours of work to troubleshoot and correct the problem. Same with the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin, I’ve used it a few times with no problems but then there was that one time…
If you decide to go with one of these options be sure to backup your database and files first! Even if you think you don’t need to, do it anyway.
Upgrading yourself, while appearing at first to be complicated, may be your best and smartest option.
If you already have experience uploading files using an FTP client, upgrading yourself is actually quite easy. And you get that wonderful sense of pride and satisfaction knowing you did it yourself. There are step by step instructions at WordPress, but the key is “step by step.” Do not skip a step, and you’ll do fine. Remember these key points:
- Back up your database (using phpMyAdmin or something similar, or via the WP-DB-Backup plugin which works quite well), and the following files in your WordPress installation:
- wp-config.php (this contains the information WordPress needs to speak to your database, it’s content is crucial.)
- all the contents of your wp-content folder, in particular your theme folder if you are using anything but the default or classic themes as they arrived out of the box, any custom plugins, and the contents of your uploads folder.
- your .htaccess & robots.txt files (which may appear in your web root.)
If you have an older version of WordPress there may be other files to be aware of, so be sure to check the instructions at WordPress.
- Back up your content by going to Manage > Export in the admin panel. Your content is also in your database backup, but in some cases having the XML file this tool generates may make recovery (if necessary) a bit less painful.
- Ensure that these backups are safely set aside where you have easy access to them (I like to keep them on my desktop until the upgrade is complete, then I file them away just in case.)
- Be sure to deactivate ALL plugins prior to upgrading. (adding the bold because I’ve seen a few people on Twitter suffering from upgrade issues that I suspect were caused by skipping this step.)
Once you’ve done this preliminary stuff, the actual upgrade is simple. WordPress recommends that you delete and replace your WordPress files rather than overwriting them, and yes, that is the safest bet. Be careful with the wp-content folder, if you delete or overwrite it you’ll lose any custom themes or added plugins (which of course you’ve saved backups of so no big deal right? Right?) Save that folder for last, then open it and the theme and plugin folders within it to upload the new versions of the default themes and plugins individually.
After the files are uploaded, go to yoursite.com/wordpressfolder/wp-admin/upgrade.php and follow the instructions (which consist of a single mouse click.) Next reactivate your plugins via the admin panel, one by one. You may see a message that a particular plugin is out of date, and some may not install at all (if you’re upgrading from an old version in particular.) You can update your plugins by going to their individual sites and grabbing the latest version. You do in most cases have the ability to let WordPress do this for you but keep in mind this involves giving your credentials to a third party.
If you decide to upgrade yourself please do not rely on this post alone. There is important information at the links I’ve provided, particularly at Wordpress and I make no guarantees that reading this post will result in a flawless upgrade. Hopefully, though, I’ve taken a bit of the mystery out of the process. The most important step you can take is back up your database and custom theme. In fact, backing up is, in my opinion, the most complicated part of an upgrade, yet it’s something that you should be doing on a regular basis anyway. If you have backups any problems that occur can be easily overcome. And once you’ve done one upgrade you won’t hesitate to keep your WordPress installation up to date and secure. So go for it!
In the early days of the Internet there was no consistent terminology. The terms website (or web site) and web presence (or Internet presence) were used interchangeably, meaning “a collection of files located at a particular web address.”
