WordPress Unplugged — And Upgraded

Don’t want to upgrade your WordPress blog to the latest version? Why not? I can only think of a couple of reasons:

1. You have plugins or custom coding that won’t work under the new version (or you simply THINK that some of your plugins or custom coding won’t work with the new version).

2. Upgrading your software is a hassle.

Let’s talk about the first one first. If you have somebody doing your custom coding, then just have them ensure that your customizations are compatible. This would include plug-ins plus anything else you’ve done to customize it. If not — if your concern is only about templates and plug-ins and stuff like that…

I’d like to point out a post on the Village-Idiot.org blog. The author of this post said it quite well:

The fact is that if you cant code, or you don’t have a guru, (or both), you are at the mercy of whatever web application you happen to be using.

Yes, if you can’t code or can’t pay to have it done, you’re at the mercy of the WordPress developers and the authors of that plugin / theme / whatever.

Oh, one more thing: If you think that it’s OK to not upgrade, there are already vulnerabilities with the older (pre-version 2.5.1.) versions of WordPress — stuff like people finding hundreds of links stuffed in their themes and megabytes of bandwidth being sucked from their sites (I found out about this on a private forum; sorry, no link…).

(NOTE: The following section was substantially re-edited to reflect features added to newer versions of WordPress on August 7, 2009 — Tom)

OK, on to number two. I think we’ve already determined that you’re either going to upgrade or fix the problems with WordPress and why this is true. So what to do about #2? Is there an easy way to upgrade your WordPress blog?

Yes, there is an easy way to upgrade your WordPress blogging software — but there’s a catch. You have to be running a recent version of WordPress (and, as always, I recommend that you run THE most recent).

The latest version includes built-in functionality for upgrading to the latest version of WordPress. When you software needs to be updated, you’ll see a graphic at the top of the web page when you log in to the Admin area that looks like this:

If you see that, just click on the link and follow the instructions to upgrade to the “latest and greatest” version of WordPress.

I recommend that you back up your blog before you do this. I’ll make a separate post on how to do this (just search for posts made around August 7, 2009 and you should be able to find it).

–Tom