Habitually Good

I have tried my best to keep up to speed with WordPress upgrades over the various releases since I started this blog. But I have been lazy about upgrading minor releases because it’s always too much work.

The scary part is that it is the minor releases which are the most important as they are usually made for fixing security holes in your WordPress installation. Well, now I will be able to keep abreast of WordPress versions because the upgrade process became a whole lot easier.

Introducing the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plug-in. This does the work for you and makes upgrading a breeze (although with a glitch as I will explain below). Here’s my experience with using it:

Once you install the plug-in, it becomes a simple step-by-step process which you can run from your WP Admin Panel.

Step 1: Backup Files – The plugin automatically backs up your WordPress installation into a zip file and provides a link for downloading it. Note that it does not backup your wp-content folder (which typically includes your uploads, plugins, and themes). So, do not consider this as your regular backup strategy.

However, for an upgrade these files do not need to be backed up anyway, it only backs up the files which would be overwritten during an upgrade (namely the core WordPress files).

Note: the zip file which was downloaded to my computer appeared as a blocked file when I tried to open it with Windows XP compressed folders for security reasons. When that happens, you will not see anything inside the zip file and will think that is is empty. But, use a program like WinRAR or WinZIP to extract it and you will see that everything has been backed up.

Step 2: Backup Data – then it takes you to step 2 which allows you to backup your data. Here it automatically chooses your core tables to backup and allows you to specify any plug-in specific tables that you may want to backup. Once again, you are prompted to download this file to your computer.

Step 3: Ready to Go – here when you click the let’s GO button, the plug-in will download the latest release from WordPress.org.

Step 4: Put site in maintenance mode – once the plug-in has successfully downloaded the latest release, it will ask you to put the site in maintenance mode. Basically what that does is that it will show any visitors to your site during this time a page which says that your site is under maintenance.

Step 5: De-activate plug-ins – now it automatically deactivates all plug-ins (but not itself )

Step 6: Let’s do it - now it starts to upgrade the installation (wish me luck, because I am doing this as I type)….. ok, it says all files have been upgraded. Cool. Before you proceed, it prompts you to click the WordPress Upgrade link to make changes to the Database (if required). And then you move to the next step (which is automatically reactivating the plug-ins that were deactivated).

Note: There’s a small glitch here which prevents this from happening. When you go to the Upgrade link, WordPress will update the database and then will log you out. When it does that, you cannot continue to the next step before logging in again. And when you do log in again, it gives some kind of message which asks you to try again.

And when you click on the try again link, it assumes that you are trying to upgrade again, and prompts you accordingly – you have to click one more link which says that clicking it will clean up from the previous attempt. I am assuming that this clean up brings the site out of maintenance mode.

Step 7: Manual Step – so what happened to the reactivating the plug-ins step? Well, that is the glitch. Since it got messed up after upgrade, it never reactivated the plug-ins. I had to activate them manually.

Conclusion – despite the glitch, this plug-in still reduced my upgrade cycle to 2-3 minutes. That is AMAZING.

And the good news doesn’t end there. There is an automatic mode which does this whole thing for you without you having to click through each step.

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