Gone are the days of upgrading WordPress manually. Thanks to Keith Dsouza of the Techie Buzz web site, you can now upgrade your WordPress blog with a few simple clicks of the mouse, all from the wp-admin console with the help from WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin.
The plugin installs just like any other plugin, in the wp-content/plugins folder on your WordPress install on your web server.
Once activated you will see the following message at the top of the Dashboard when an upgrade is available:
Once you click the link you will be presented with some dialog that will guide you through the upgrade process as show by the following screenshots. The dialog is broken down into three sections describing, what task has been done, the task status and what task needs to be done next.
Here you can see that some old WordPress files are backed up and ready for download to your system in case something goes wrong. The next step is to backup the database.
Here the WP database has been backed up and is ready for download. Next will show options for uploading the latest WP files.
I always choose to let the plugin get the latest version from wordpress.org.
The latest files have been successfully downloaded and unzipped to my web server. Next we go into maintenance mode for the site which is a very nice feature to let your readers know things are OK and why the site is down.
Now the site is in maintenance mode and you can verify by clicking the link. Next we de-activate all plugins, but not Auto Upgrade of course.
The plugins are de-activated and next the upgrade begins.
The upgrade install is complete but here you can check if a database update needs to be completed. The link opens a new window with the WP database upgrade button.
Here’s the Database Upgrade button.
We see that the WP database upgrade is complete.
Here we see that the plugins have been re-activated which was the next step after the database upgrade.
We’re almost done. Here we can see the WordPress upgrade has been completed and the plugin wants to do a bit of house cleaning from all the zipped and unzipped updates.
All files have been cleaned up and the upgrade is complete.
While there seems to be a lot of steps to complete a WordPress upgrade using this plugin, the alternative of doing a manual upgrade takes a lot longer to complete.
I’ve been using this plugin for some time now and I’ve had no issues. But, like anything, you may want to do a manual backup of your WP files and database prior to first using this plugin, just in case it doesn’t work as advertised for you. After you test and find it works… go for it. It’s truly a time saver. Easy button anyone?
A few posts back I explained the process of upgrading a WordPress install using an Automatic Upgrade Plugin from Techie Buzz. While the new version of WordPress (2.7) now includes an auto upgrade feature, you still need to upgrade to version 2.7 before you get this feature built-in.
