Upgrading to WordPress 2.7

Photo by whiteafrican

I learned my lesson when I moved this blog and ended up upgrading WordPress from many versions ago. I resolved to keep my WordPress installations upgraded to the latest version.

So today I upgraded this blog to version 2.7 of WordPress. It was pretty easy. I followed the instructions on the WordPress documentation (codex) about Upgrading Wordpress.

The main steps are these:

1. Download the latest version of WordPress and unzip it.
2. Back up your site!
3. Deactivate all your plugins. Sometimes it causes problems if you leave them activated.
4. Start up your favorite FTP program and connect to your site.
5. Delete the wp-includes folder at your site, and upload the new wp-includes folder from the unzipped version of WordPress from step 1.
6. In the same way, delete the old wp-admin folder and upload the new one.
7. Check the wp-content folder. This folder contains your plugins and themes. Your theme might be customized. It didn’t look like there was anything I needed to upload there, so I left it alone. This is the safest thing to do, so you don’t lose any customization you have done to your site.
8. Upload new versions of the files that are not in a folder. Be sure not to overwrite your wp-config.php file, since this contains your database info and password. You can say “yes” to overwrite everything else. You can manually check the wp-config-sample.php file to see if anything needs to be updated in your wp-config.php file, but there was nothing – it looked fine, so I left it alone.
9. That’s it for transferring the files – now I went to my wp-admin area. It gave me a message that I needed to upgrade the database, so I clicked on the button and it did that. It worked fine.
10. Now I just went to my plugins area and checked to see if any plugins had new versions. If they did, I clicked on the link to upgrade them automatically. After that, I activated all the plugins that I had active before. I did this one-by-one and refreshed the site each time in between. This is so that, if a plugin is causing problems, you will know which one is the problem one.
11. Voila – I was done!

Version 2.7 has some nice features, so it is worth upgrading. Here are some of the features I noticed. (Some of them might have been in previous versions of WordPress, but I just never noticed.)

• Making a post stick to the home page. This can be done right while editing the post in WordPress 2.7, which is really handy. In the “Publish” section of the “Edit Post” page, look for the word “Visibility” and click on the little “Edit” link next to it. There will be a checkbox for “Stick this post to the front page”.
• Tags. When adding tags to a post, you can click on “Choose from the most popular tags” and get a list of tags that you have previously used. This helps if you can’t remember what tags you have used in the past.
• Export/Import functions under “Tools” – these let you export a backup of your database, or import one from another blog.

If you have Fantastico, you can sometimes use that to upgrade WordPress versions, but I felt more comfortable doing it manually. Either way, if you back up your site before you start, you can’t go wrong. You can always go back to the backup.

- Pat Doyle