WordPress Hack #7: Upgrading to a New Version (WP 2.5 Guide)

Ever wondered how to upgrade WordPress? Want to know what WordPress 2.5 looks like and if you should upgrade? I’ll kill 2 birds with one stone in today’s hack…

Today’s hack is more of a tutorial and a guide. First, many people ask me how to upgrade WordPress to a new version, because they’ve never done it. So, in response is a quick checklist of “what-to-do” and how easy it is to upgrade your WordPress installation. In addition, since the latest version of WordPress (2.5) is such a MAJOR release, I’m also going to go over everything you need to know about it so you can decide if you should upgrade now or not.

Sometimes I wait quite a few months before upgrading to the latest version of WordPress because I use so many plugins and I want to be sure I don’t have any conflicts. Also, I had read so many reviews that said “wait” or “I don’t like the changes”. I guess since I’m admidst my 30 Days of WordPress Hacks I feel I owe it to my readers to upgrade to 2.5 and be sure that all my hacks don’t have any issues in the latest version of WordPress.

If you are considering upgrading from a previous version of WordPress to 2.5 – first look at the WordPress 2.5 Plugin Compatibility List. See if the plugins that you use are on the “working plugin” list, but more importanly see if there are “conflicting plugins” that you can’t run at the same time, or if you use anything in the “non-working plugin” list. If you use a plugin with issues, go to the author’s plugin page and see if there’s an update, or at least an announcement of some kind when it will be 2.5 compatible. You could always email the plugin author. Now you have to decide whether you can move on and upgrade without it (for now) or wait to upgrade to 2.5 until later. Another possibility is, you might even be able to look through the working plugin list and find a suitable replacement that does the same thing.

So, if you decide to upgrade to 2.5 (or any version), here’s what you do:

• Visit WordPress.org and download the latest version of WordPress
• Unzip the file to your desktop, you should have a folder named “wordpress”
• Connect to your site in FTP and download a copy of all your files “just in case”
• Backup your database (“dump” a copy you can copy or download) in your webhost control panel
• Connect to your web site in FTP, and upload all the files in the “wordpress” folder to the root of your web site, copying over all the existing ones. Don’t worry, this will not overwrite your existing theme or plugins in any way *unless* you are using the default WordPress theme (Kubrick)
• Once the files have uploaded, immediately go to your browser and bring up www.yourdomainhere.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php. You should get a page saying your database needs to be upgraded for the new version, just click on it (one time), and once it’s finished you’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.5!
• Login to your WordPress dashboard to see what’s new!

When you login to WordPress 2.5 for the first time you’ll find that the dashboard has been revamped quite a bit. Please keep in mind when you view *my* screenshots that I have a *lot* of plugins intstalled, and you might see a thing or two that you won’t have in a regular WordPress 2.5 install. I’ll try to point out my “extras” as I go along – you may want to add them as well…I’ll going to show you exactly what I saw right after upgrade, in fact I’m writing this post as I do the upgrade, so you’re going to get my first hand views and thoughts of WordPress 2.5.

Page 2: WordPress 2.5 Dashboard First Impressions

I think the main reason that a lot of people are squaking about the 2.5 upgrade is because it’s different and not what you’re used too. People naturally fight change and resist new ideas they’re not used to. I think that the layout of is great, and it’s as it “should have been” from the beginning because it’s a bit more intuitive. I always thought the WP dashboard was a bit weird to navigate, but I just accepted it and got used to it over time. My first impression logging into the new WordPress 2.5 dashboard was – “WOW!”:

Right away you notice that you have a bright strip with options to write a page or post, very handy since that’s what we do most often. Other than the obvious “style” changes, the things that have moved are the “dashboard” link which went to a tab at the top, and at top right links have been added to both “help” and “forums”. “Blogroll”, “Presentation”, and “Options” have all been removed. In this pic “cformsII” has been added by my “contact forms” plugin. Presentation was renamed to “Design” and “Options” is now “settings” (to the right), and “Plugins” and “Users” has been moved to the right as well.

I like the new layout better, you get quick stats at a glance, you get posts, pages, comments, categorys, tags, and draft stats all at once. The addition of tag and draft stats appears to be new. It also tells you what theme, how many widgets, wordpress version, and askimet info. In my dashboard you also see subscriber stats which comes from the WP View Subscriber Info plugin by MaxPower.

Directly below this block are recent comments and incoming links. I like the fact that each blog is a fixed width that scrolls. In incoming links the “See All” link still takes you to google blog search, but both the edit and RSS links are new. So now, you can add an RSS feed to your incoming links to your feed reader. But wait – there’s more! When you click “edit” you can change what RSS feed to use to monitor incoming links. You could change it to Yahoo, the regular google index, MSN Live Search, Technorati, or whatever you want. You control how many items to show, and whether or not to display the date. I’m changing mine to “20″.

In a new twist, both the WordPress Development Blog and Other WordPress News RSS feed blocks have “edit” capabilities as well, and can load any RSS feed you like in those blocks as well. w00t!

Since we’re here, let me show you just a few pimp tricks for your new WordPress 2.5 Dashboard home.

Add a “Notes” section to your WordPress Dashboard

This is something I think that WordPress should have by default, a section where you can write a “to-do” list for yourself or other author’s. You can’t just stuff everything into draft posts. This creates a digital scratch pad or sticky note for you to work with. The plugin that does this has the unfortunate name of Headache with Pictures. This plugin unfortunately also has been abandoned by the author (the plugin page and web site are gone) – so the previous link is a zipped copy of my version, which appears to work just fine in WordPress 2.5. As you can see in the example pic below, this plugin just ads a “notes” section to your dashboard home. Just type in your notes and “save” and they’ll be there next time you login (very handy!).

I also have the official WordPress.com Stats plugin installed. Now, in my dashboard home (if I’m logged in) I also get a snapshot of my stats in quick-view:

It shows views, top posts, top searches, and Most Active at a glance.

Page 3: WordPress 2.5 Comments

Next I’m going to take a look at comments, mainly due to the fact that I’ve been nicely notified in my Dashboard I have something to approve:

I don’t think I’ll miss comments waiting for moderation every again thanks to the addition of the “waiting bubble”. Look how much the comments section of the dashboard has improved as well:

Talk about options! The comment awaiting moderation is highlighted. I can either quickly approve, spam, or delete, or also check multiple comments and manage using the buttons in the blue band above. The two new things I noted here were the addition of the commenter’s picture (from WordPress.com?), and when you manage the comment it’s done with Ajax (the page doesn’t have to reload). Very, very nice.

Page 4: WordPress 2.5 Options or “Settings”

Previously your dashboard had a section entitled “Options” which has been moved to the top right in navigation and has been renamed to “Settings”. The main options seem pretty much the same:

What I did find new was under “Settings -> Discussion”, a new section for “Avatars”.

Wordpress now utilizes “Gravatars” or “Globally Recognized Avatars”, and that’s why I saw the picture in the comments earlier when I approved it. The rest of the options seemed pretty much the same to me. As I went through “Plugins”, “Users”, and “Design” (used to be Presentation) I didn’t see any obvious changes other than styling.

Page 5: WordPress 2.5 Managing Content

When I clicked on the “Manage” link in the dashboard I saw distinct changes right away. First is the addition of the checkboxes beside posts, so you can checkoff and delete multiple posts at once if you so choose. In addition is the “status” column to the right so you can see if a post is published or draft. The “tags” and “categories” columns are new as well. Now you can just click items to go to them, like clicking the post title takes you to “edit”. Clicking the author, tag, or category takes you directly to them. The “published / draft” dropdown has been split into links above the table now. The comment column now has a little bubble with comment counts, this was already available in 2.3.3, so only the display has improved.

Managing pages is pretty much the same, except you can view “published” and “private”, but “drafts” has been removed as a sort option:

The top level dashboard pick “Blogroll” has now been moved under “Manage” and it’s been renamed to “Links”. I didn’t see any changes to “Blogroll” other than the fact that the name blogroll has been updated to “Links”.

Manage categories also has the nice addition of the ability to bulk delete with a newly added checkbox:

Many of you will love the fact that there’s now a “Manage Tags” pages. In WordPress 2.3x we saw tags introduced for the first time, but there was no way to manage them at all. The only way to do this was to scavange a plugin from the web somewhere. Now, you can manage tags just like categories.

I never used this feature, but a lot of people used to go to “Manage -> Upload” to upload content to their blog (images and media) to use in posts. The upload tab is gone now, because it’s available (only) directly on the “Write” pages, and it’s been replaced with “Manage -> Media Library”, which for the first time allows WordPress bloggers to manage, delete, and find media they’ve uploaded to their blog.

Page 6: WordPress 2.5 Writing Content

I saved the best for last, the new WordPress 2.5 “Write” tabs. I think they have changed the most, and will be the most positive change for you, once you get used to them. The first time you go to write a new post in WP 2.5 – this is what you’ll see:

The first thing you’ll notice is that you have Write “page”, “post” or “link” (which has been relocated here). Next, under the title box for Write Post on the right are some icons for adding media to the “Media Library” we just talked about. But these are no ordinary icons, for instance – when I click on the first one “add image” I get some options in fancy “lightbox” mode like this:

I can now add an image AND an alt title description, and even choose my alignment so the text floats around it! You can even click on the “Media Library” tab at the top to use existing images. But wait – there’s more! You can also uploade video now!

And look, now only can you upload video from your computer, but you can also add a URL, like a YouTube URL! No more broken YouTube URL’s yaaaaay! That does away with a half-dozen different plugins out there for managing YouTube links the visual editor won’t break them. Audio files (third icon) have the same option – but I don’t know if they’re displayed any differently than a hyperlink. The last icon is to upload and manage any media that doesn’t fall under the first 3 categories (like a PDF or Office doc).

Now I’m using the default editor, on this blog I don’t use the Visual editor – so I’ll have to look at that another day. But in my tag buttons above I see one I haven’t seen before which is “lookup”. I wondered what it was so I typed in a word to see what kind of results I would get. I typed in the word “delicious” and hit enter, and a new tab opened with the result from answers.com:

Pretty cool, the next time I want to know how to spell a word or a definition I can just do it right from my post! Off to the right is my publish block, which is a little refined, but also I now see “related” links to manage comments, posts, categories, tags, and drafts. Now somebody’s thinking! Manage tags and categories are now below the post, and you can toggle between “all” or “most used”:

Page 7: WordPress 2.5 Guide Final Thoughts

I’ve read a lot of reviews and posts about WordPress 2.5, but none of them gave me the information I just gave you – so I didn’t have enough information to make an educated decision on whether or not to upgrade yet. I took a chance, and I’m glad I did, because the new style and interface rocks!

Let’s recap reasons to upgrade:

• Enhanced layout of Dashboard home, including ability to add RSS feeds
• Comments now support “Gravatars”
• Improved comment moderation notifications
• Media upload and management with new “Media Library” functions
• Tag Management
• Write “lookup” button

No upgrade is ever perfect, and I’m sure that you (and I) will have some questions after upgrading to WordPress 2.5 that I didn’t cover in this guide. That’s ok – I’ve already thought about that. I want you to bookmark this link right now: Answers to Questions about WordPress version 2.5. Thanks to MichaelH, that’s a list of all the questions and answers from email lists right after people ugraded to WordPress 2.5 for the first time. I’m sure that page will help you a lot for the first few weeks.

I hope you enjoyed this guide, and as always – if you have something to add to make it better (something I forgot?) or a question – please comment now! See you tomorrow for the next WordPress hack!