How do I upgrade my WordPress blog with Fantastico?

My WordPress blog has recently been telling me it’s outdated and there’s a new version of WordPress. I had installed it using Fantastico on my hosting panel, how do I go about upgrading it?


I got this question from the Webmistress down at Carper Diem, who was getting worried about all the alerts WordPress was sending her way warning her to upgrade her blog. The newer versions of WordPress now show an alert on ever page if the blog software needs upgrading. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t upgrade, but newer versions always have more functionality and usually have better security also, so it’s always a good idea to upgrade if you can. This is the message you’ll see when you need to upgrade:

Now, in this case, the blog was installed using Fantastico, a great utility that a number of hosting companies provide to make installing software really really easy. Most hosting companies and franchises tend to use it as it makes things easier for their technical support guys if people can just install software effortlessly. And the great thing is that upgrading the software is just as effortless. Here’s how you do it:

  • Log into Fantastico. It will show you that an installed package needs an upgrade
  • Click on the new version of WordPress
  • Click Upgrade

Fantastico will do all the work for you, take backups of your blog, install the new software and get it all set up. There you go, that wasn’t hard was it?

4 thoughts on “How do I upgrade my WordPress blog with Fantastico?”

  1. Does that plug in to upgrade wordpress for ya work? i haven’t tried it yet. I heard people lost all there intel though cause of it. Just always back up your information.

  2. I was v.nervous the first time I used it, so I had run a database backup and also exported all the posts etc. to an XML first.
    However, I’ve experienced no major issues with it at all.
    Minor things? The automated version (currently temporarily disabled) would not work until I upgraded server to PHP5. Plugins were not automatically re-enabled, although latest version of the WPAU plugin fixed this issue. Files needed to be cleaned up (automatically) following an upgrade. Again this was fixed in the last version I used to go from 2.5.1 to 2.6 . One small other issue with a flash blocking plugin preventing two SWF files from being uploaded to server. See recent post on my blog for details and solution.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.