Many of you downloaded my free ebook on using the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin to make upgrading WP as easy as it gets. I wanted to give you a heads up that some things have changed that impact the instructions in that ebook.
With version 2.7, WordPress began including their own automatic upgrade function. As of this writing, the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin is incompatible with WP 2.7!
If you are still on a version of WordPress prior to 2.7, the ebook instructions work fine. If, however, you have already upgraded to version 2.7 and you have the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin activated, be sure to deactivate it before using WordPress’ built in automatic upgrade. If you don’t, you will get an error message and the upgrade will fail.
I would suggest leaving the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin on your blog site for the moment. The author may update it to work with 2.7. I sincerely hope he does as backing up the blog code files is now a manual operation. The built in WP upgrade warns you to backup your files and database, but gives you no way to do that automatically.
At the moment, I don’t have a suggestion for backing up your blog files, however, for backing up your database, I highly recommend the WordPress Database Backup plugin. This plugin provides a way to schedule backups of your database at regular intervals and also lets you backup your database on demand. One of the options is to have the backup emailed to you, which I find very handy.
The WordPress 2.7 built in automatic upgrade works like a charm. I’ve upgraded a number of blogs to 2.7.1 using it and had no problems. The key is to remember to deactivate the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin first, if you have it activated in your blog.
Be sure to backup your blog files first using whatever method works for you. Use the WordPress Database Backup plugin to backup your database. Once you’re backed up, get your blog updated to the latest version (2.7.1 as of this writing).
John The Geek
This blog is intended to share technical tips and tricks with webmasters, Internet marketers, and any others who have an interest in computers and the Internet. See my About page for probably more than you want to know about me, but suffice to say that I’ve been a computer professional for many years and still have an interest in all things technical. I don’t claim to know everything there is to know about computers or the Internet, but I’ve been around long enough to figure things out pretty quickly.
If you have techniques of your own you’d like to share, please feel free to do so. All I ask is that you make sure that what you’re suggesting works (and not just on your own machine!) and try to give the reader some idea if they need to be a geek to implement it, or if an average computer user can make use of it. Hopefully, we can create a resource that people will come to when they want to know how to make something work.
Thanks for being there!
