My WordPress blog has recently been telling me it’s outdated and there’s a new version of WordPress.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?
One other possibility for users who don’t want to get too dirty with root access or plain vanilla upgrading by FTP is the plugin. The advantage to this is that you do not have to wait for Fantastico to roll out the latest version of WP. I’m not sure about the lag these days, but it used to be that you had sometimes to wait a week or two for important security updates to be found in minor revision updates to be available.
(Not affiliated with the free plugin btw, just a content user)
ooops, apologies for the ugly link forming there, please do feel free to correct it and remove this comment, sorry.
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.
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.