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.
My day job is a Test Engineer so I don’t trust developers =)~ . I personally would like to see how my blog fares with major releases by creating a copy of my production blog into a test site and upgrade that test site to WordPress 2.5.
After upgrading, I found out first hand that I had a problem with easy gravatars, lazyest gallery, popularity contest, link harvester, and my own NowThen Photo Display plugin. So many things broke at once. Luckily I was also able debug and fix my blog in the background without visitors seeing all the issues.
I’ve outline the necessary steps to create a test blog here.
It’s totally worth it if you have many visitors to your site.
Thaya Kareesons last blog post..Make WP-PostViews Work with WP-Super-Cache
I usually install all the updates on my local machine and tests all the plugins. When I am satisfied with all of the related themes and plugins, I copy all the files to to my live server.
I upgraded to 2.5 and it is working perfectly right for me.
Shafiq Rehmans last blog post..TP-LINK TD-W8920G Wireless ADSL2 Router Review
Nice post….:)
But Instead of doing manual upgradation i recommend to use Automatic Upgrade plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-automatic-upgrade/)….:D
it’s very easy to use ….and i does all the pre and post upgrade tasks…
I upgraded one of my blog using it and it took me just 1 minute to do upgradation 😀
That’s a popular plugin, but one that I would never recommend for most people. You have to check the compatible plugin list every time before upgrading, just to be sure you don’t have a big conflict. If that plugin could do an automatic check of that list before upgrading, I might think about it. For now, the safest way to upgrade is manually…
I would also suggest downloading the xampplite package. It is basically a no install apache / mysql self setup local website.
This gives you the luxury of running your own local copy of your website, so you can test upgrades or code changes locally before uploading for the world to see.
Tarkan
I really like the local testing idea! I might give that a shot one of these days.