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How to Write a Website

How to upgrade to WordPress 2.7 – The easy way!

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Image by Matt Thomas via Flickr

It is time to upgrade to WordPress 2.7

If you are like me you probably like to wait a few weeks months years to install the newest software. Upgrades take time, you have to learn new stuff, and new software usually breaks.

WordPress 2.7 is a little different. I have never seen software go through such a thorough vetting before release. Hundreds (possibly thousands) were testing this well in advance of release and multiple thousands were using it by the time of the official release.

All that testing does not make it any easier to install, though. Or does it? One those testers built a plugin to make upgrading super-easy.

The Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin will take you through each step of the upgrade process. It gives you a one-click option to create backups then puts your blog in maintenance mode, installs the files, and finishes the upgrade. After installing the plugin, (plugins are much easier to install than the full WordPress application) you have 5-10 clicks and you are done!

So let’s get started:

  1. Click here to download the plugin.
  2. Upload the file you just downloaded into the /wp-content/plugins/ folder.
  3. Unzip the file. (If I have lost you at this point, let me know. This is different for each host, but I can help you individually. Just ask.)
  4. Goto your wp-admin and click the Plugins menu and the Plugins sub-menu
  5. Find “Wordpress Automatic Upgrade” and activate it.
  6. After activating the plugin you will see a pink bar at the top that says “Click Here to Automatically Upgrade WordPress to latest Version.
  7. Anybody care to guess what the next step is?
  8. Yup, Click on that link and enter the twilight zone.

After this you will have to click “Next Step” several times, and whenever it gives you a chance to download back-ups, do it. (two different parts need to be backed up) You will also need to click on the link to upgrade your database.

Please let me know who things work out for you. I want to hear all those, “Wow! That was easy!” exclamations. I also want to hear about any trouble  along the way, so maybe I can update these notes to make things even easier for others.

[Update]

Oh! Share this post with as many people as you possibly can. You can use social bookmarks like del.icio.us or rating sites like digg. Even better, you can copy this post onto your blog or write a post linking here. Let’s try to make this easy for as many people as possible.

[/Update]

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  1. Pingback from 7 Ways to increase your website traffic | Techno Blog

    [...] How to upgrade to WordPress 2.7 – The easy way! [...]

  2. Jack Clarke posted the following on December 12, 2008 at 10:32 pm.

    Whew! Thanks so much for this article – seriously I was dreading it…. but I can report the plugin worked like a charm, smooth as silk and only took a few minutes.

    2.7 definitely has a cleaner more streamlined look.

  3. David Drinnon posted the following on December 12, 2008 at 10:58 pm.

    This is wonderful! Thank you for providing this great tool. Worked great without problems and I am running it on Windows Server 2008.

  4. Jim Bradley posted the following on December 13, 2008 at 1:20 pm.

    Thanks so much for this post. Went smooth as can be. Thanks again.

  5. Luke Gedeon posted the following on December 13, 2008 at 1:40 pm.

    Jack, David, and Jim,

    I am glad this helped you with upgrading. Now, will you help others by posting this information, or at least a link to it on your blog?

    A lot of people are upgrading right now that do not know about this plugin. We need to get the word out.

    Thanks.

  6. Pingback from Oh 2.7, you know just what I like… » Josh Nunn’s Geekorium

    [...] How to upgrade to WordPress 2.7 – The easy way! [...]

  7. Myhouse posted the following on December 14, 2008 at 10:39 pm.

    That a great plugin.

  8. Pingback from Upgrading to WordPress 2.7 - The easy way! | Banwaan

    [...] and as what Luke’s say is share this to everyone. Here is the original post by Luke in his blog (No Ratings Yet)  Loading [...]

  9. afterdv posted the following on December 15, 2008 at 7:49 pm.

    thanks Luke for making that correction…i can say that using the steps and the plugin was no pain for me. may the others find it useful.

  10. Dayne Lyons posted the following on December 15, 2008 at 8:36 pm.

    Works like a CHARM!

    My host tried the upgrade and I tried the upgrade and it didn’t work.

    Tried this plugin, which a lot of people at the Wordpress Support Forums disregarded and BAM! Site was WORKING!

    Fantastic!! Works GREAT!

  11. Sage posted the following on December 18, 2008 at 2:20 pm.

    Have you had any issues with this plugin that we should be aware of? The idea of messing up the blog I spent hours to get the way I wanted it makes me shudder.

    do you know if 2.7 is compatible with the Vistalicious theme?

  12. Luke Gedeon posted the following on December 18, 2008 at 2:39 pm.

    Sage, I totally understand your concern. It worked great for me and many others, and I have not heard of any problems but this is dependent on the server you are using so there is always that possibility. Of course, there is an even greater chance (at least in my case) of messing it up trying to upgrade manually. :)

    The first thing the plugin does is a backup of your current files and your database. It then gives you the option to download the back-ups. (2 separate files) Download them and make sure the plugin was able to actually create a back-up. If the back-up worked you can go ahead with confidence.

    Let us know how it goes.

  13. Sage posted the following on December 18, 2008 at 4:13 pm.

    Thanks for your reply. Is it true that hosting on GoDaddy causes problems with this plugin or do you know?

    As a side note….my sister let me name her middle child since I couldn’t have any. I named him Luke. :-)

  14. Luke Gedeon posted the following on December 18, 2008 at 4:18 pm.

    I am on a godaddy linux box and did not have any trouble.

  15. Sage posted the following on December 18, 2008 at 4:26 pm.

    Now that really makes me feel better. I read somewhere that upgrades with an auto upgrader are particularly problematic with GoDaddy.

    I need to see if my theme is compatible with 2.7 and if it is I will upgrade tonight.

    I unzip my files before uploading to GoDaddy….is that a problem? I don’t know how to upload it and then unzip it.

    Thanks again for the plugin and the information!

  16. Luke Gedeon posted the following on December 18, 2008 at 4:51 pm.

    Sage,

    I wonder if they were talking about the auto-upgrade inside Hosting Central. I have heard of problems with hosting central in general, but this runs completely inside WordPress.

    Unzipping the plugin before uploading is not a problem if that is what you are used to. Zipped files usually upload faster, but the files are small enough in this case not to make a difference.

    I missed your comment about the name, at first. That is pretty cool. I think Luke is a particularly great name. :)

    Also, I have not gotten around to testing any themes yet. I have been focusing on plugins.

  17. Sage posted the following on December 18, 2008 at 5:03 pm.

    Luke is a great name.

    I really appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions.

  18. Yoko posted the following on December 20, 2008 at 11:14 pm.

    Dude.. It doesn’t work with my blog. below is the failed log. Hopefully you can help me.

    Task Name: maintmode
    Task Description: Puts the site into maintenance mode
    Task Status: Failed
    Task Start Date: 2008-12-20 23:08:06
    Task End Date: 2008-12-20 23:08:06
    Task Log:
    Putting the site into maintenance mode /home/nizbila/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-automatic-upgrade
    Copying /home/nizbila/public_html/index.php to /home/nizbila/public_html/index.php.wpau.bak
    The file was successfully copied
    Moving the maintenance file to root
    ERROR -> Could not put the site into maintenance mode

  19. Luke Gedeon posted the following on December 21, 2008 at 12:25 am.

    Yoko,

    Putting your blog into “maintenance mode” is not a required step. It just gives people a friendly error message if they try to visit while you are upgrading. Does it give an option to skip that step?

    However this could also indicate that your file permissions are too restrictive. And later steps may not work either.

    The most important step is the back-ups make sure to download and test them. You need the backups even if you upgrade manually.

    If skipping the maintenance mode is not an option or you would rather not skip it you may need to temporarily change file permissions on your /home/nizbila/public_html/ folder.

    Here is the link to the plugin author: http://techie-buzz.com/wordpress-plugins/wordpress-automatic-upgrade-12-release.html
    He might be able to give you more specific help. I might do a little research in the morning too, but my eyes are so blurry right now I am not sure I would be much help.

  20. Mike Mallowe posted the following on December 26, 2008 at 3:26 pm.

    Wow…. a completely idiot proof way to get the latest upgrade…I was hesitating for months to get this, fearing I’d loose everything… all better now…long live this plug-in!!! Thank you, Luke

  21. Pingback from Wordpress 2.7 is not bad | Barnabas Nagy

    [...] How to upgrade to WordPress 2.7 – The easy way! [...]

  22. Maria Palma posted the following on January 3, 2009 at 2:18 pm.

    Hi Luke,

    Wow – that was sooo easy! Thank you for sharing this with us. I am eternally grateful ;) I was putting off upgrading because I always run into trouble, so I *love* this.

  23. Luke Gedeon posted the following on January 3, 2009 at 4:36 pm.

    Mike and Marie,

    Thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment.

    Most of the thanks for the easy upgrade goes to the guys who put together the plugin, but I am glad that I blogged about it. It is so cool to be small part of making life easier for so many people.

    Pass the news on to other people so they can have an easy upgrade too.

  24. Eric Sornoso posted the following on January 5, 2009 at 7:31 pm.

    Great Plug-In. It worked like a charm!

    Life is Beautiful!

  25. Paul K. posted the following on January 5, 2009 at 10:39 pm.

    Wow, that was awesome. Just used the plug-in to upgrade to WP 2.7 and it was smooth sailing. My site is hosted by godaddy and I had tried three times to use godaddy’s “automatic” upgrade, but I got error messages every time. I can confirm that the plug-in works on godaddy-hosted sites. Very cool :) Glad I found this article. Kudos to all!

  26. ladygeek posted the following on January 14, 2009 at 12:40 pm.

    hi it didn’t work for me. the site says it’s “under maintenance”.

  27. Luke Gedeon posted the following on January 15, 2009 at 7:50 pm.

    Looks like you might be having trouble with BlueHost not WordPress. Are you referring to the dutdot domain?

  28. affrodite posted the following on January 25, 2009 at 12:12 pm.

    Thank you soooooooooo much for virtually “holding my hand” through this process. I recently switched over one of my blogs (eventually all of them) from free, point and click world of wordpress.com over to wordpress.org using bluehost. Everything I do has me pulling out my hair trying to figure it out so posts like the one you have here makes life so incredibly easy for people like me who don’t want to become super tech savvy in the process.

    While this subject matter does not normally have a home on my blog, I did just craft one with a link back to your post: http://affrodite.net/?p=277

    Thanks again!

  29. google pagerank posted the following on January 26, 2009 at 4:29 am.

    I am having problems viewing the plugin – not showing up at all?? all my other plugin works okay. any thoughts?

  30. google pagerank posted the following on January 26, 2009 at 8:44 am.

    Hey Luke,

    Thanks for the email advice BTW

  31. Danica posted the following on January 28, 2009 at 12:39 am.

    Thank you so much for this, I’ve been avoiding updating my wordpress for a good while now because I had no idea how and the guide was confusing me, but this was so simple and easy! Thank you again!

  32. Jen posted the following on January 28, 2009 at 8:28 pm.

    You lost me at step 3. Help! Thank you :)

  33. Karine Barzilai-Nahon posted the following on January 30, 2009 at 5:12 pm.

    I am trying to upgrade my site from wordpress 2.61 to 2.7 with the plugin and for some reason it notifies me as if I have the latest version, and then it doesn’t work. Any ideas?

  34. Pearl posted the following on February 11, 2009 at 3:17 pm.

    WOW that was FAST! Thank you so much for posting this! Before I found this article, I was quite intimidated to upgrade my website. The instructions of other people seem so complicated. This is my first upgrade since my website is !fairly new. And you made it a whole lot easier! Keep it up!

    Many thanks,
    Pearl

  35. Charlotte posted the following on February 27, 2009 at 6:02 pm.

    I keep getting hung up at the nag about cleaning up old files. I click here — and then get an error message that it can’t get into my FTP —

    Are there files I can clean up manually to get past this?

    thanks
    Charlotte

  36. Motorcycles posted the following on March 17, 2009 at 3:18 pm.

    Very nice information. Thanks for this.

  37. david posted the following on March 23, 2009 at 3:58 pm.

    You are great…

    Thanks for the TIP

    :)

  38. henry posted the following on March 24, 2009 at 10:02 am.

    Awesome. You’re the man!

  39. Sony KDL46V5100 posted the following on April 6, 2009 at 10:18 pm.

    Great Plug-In. It worked like a charm!

  40. Tracey posted the following on April 17, 2009 at 5:30 pm.

    That was awesome. Worked like a charm. Thanks so much! I will definitely pass it along to others.

  41. The Sign Maker posted the following on April 20, 2009 at 2:36 am.

    Great thanks for the info, this worked great!

  42. Music Forum posted the following on May 6, 2009 at 1:54 pm.

    Thank you very much :P

  43. Amanda Daniels posted the following on May 16, 2009 at 1:47 pm.

    I have wanted to do this for the last 6 months and I have now done it in minutes. Great and useful post. Thanks Manda

  44. Luke Gedeon posted the following on May 16, 2009 at 3:40 pm.

    Manda and everyone else that has been kind enough stop by and say thanks, I want to say thanks to you too. Your comments have made me glad over and over again that I posted this. I almost did not, “because it was already on the web”, but not everyone reads the same sites so this is one way to get this helpful plugin out to more people. You guys have made my day more than once.

  45. BestHelen posted the following on June 5, 2009 at 8:21 pm.

    I have found what i was looking for !!! thx )

  46. Yahya posted the following on June 9, 2009 at 1:52 pm.

    Thank you so much! Finally!

  47. r4 nintendo ds posted the following on June 10, 2009 at 1:50 am.

    Thanks – I hope it keeps working great for all!

    1 question though – I thought iframes are bad for seo?

  48. Zukny posted the following on June 17, 2009 at 12:22 am.

    I don’t know what I did wrong, but the Automatic upgrade wasn’t working, so I decided to “manually install” 2.8, upgrade from 2.7. When I downloaded the file to my computer, it came “unzipped.” so I added all files except Wp-content to my ftp server. After I did this my web page dissapeared completely.

    I know I did something wrong, I am asking for your your help though if you could email me, and possibly talk me through it?

  49. Zukny posted the following on June 17, 2009 at 12:22 am.

    I don’t know what I did wrong, but the Automatic upgrade wasn’t working, so I decided to “manually install” 2.8, upgrade from 2.7. When I downloaded the file to my computer, it came “unzipped.” so I added all files except Wp-content to my ftp server. After I did this my web page dissapeared completely.

    I know I did something wrong, I am asking for your your help though if you could email me, and possibly talk me through it? http://www.mymorningstory.com

  50. Frank posted the following on July 3, 2009 at 12:33 pm.

    It works fine. Nice! Thanks for sharing this information!
    Frank´s last blog ..Gesetz gegen Steuerhinterziehung verabschiedet My ComLuv Profile

  51. Jim Maginity posted the following on July 14, 2009 at 12:10 pm.

    I liked the upgraded WP 2.7. I felt it worked fine but have had trouble with the 2.8 upgrade from that. Now there is a further upgrade and am not so sure I want to jump on that one so fast. So I appreciated what you said about waiting to upgrade! Thanks for that!
    Jim Maginity´s last blog ..jasmine My ComLuv Profile

  52. Caleb posted the following on July 16, 2009 at 12:20 am.

    Do you think it’s worth holding off on a 2.8 upgrade. I always get worried when I have so many plugins and everything is working fine at 2.7
    Caleb´s last blog ..5 Tips to Keep Your House Clean My ComLuv Profile

  53. Tom Jones posted the following on July 17, 2009 at 1:32 am.

    Thanks for the tips Luke. I always feel more comfortable holding off for awhile before each update to allow all of my favorite plug-ins to make their corrections.
    Tom Jones´s last blog ..Wondershare Photo Collage Studio My ComLuv Profile

  54. panicattackmum posted the following on July 18, 2009 at 12:17 pm.

    What are the benefits of upgrading, what does the new version offer?
    panicattackmum´s last blog ..Least Expensive GoPhone My ComLuv Profile

  55. Shopping posted the following on July 18, 2009 at 6:41 pm.

    We had several upgrades to do and quite a bit of downtime but the benifits to us have been great

  56. Louis Vuitton Handbags and Wallets posted the following on July 20, 2009 at 2:04 pm.

    Keep working, great job, I love it!

  57. Lao Shi posted the following on July 20, 2009 at 11:21 pm.

    If you use this method to update, does this really effect any other plugins you are using?

  58. Thomas Escuse posted the following on July 21, 2009 at 10:47 am.

    I love how you can do the Wordpress upgrades from the admin interface now. I mean I didnt really have a problem doing the upgrade manually with FTP and so on, but uploading 1000’s of files takes aggges… Now it can do it live in a few seconds.

  59. Caleb posted the following on July 21, 2009 at 3:53 pm.

    can’t you upgrade wordpress more easily using fantastico through cpanel?

  60. Simon Wilby posted the following on July 23, 2009 at 11:40 pm.

    Well, I upgrade my site using the automatic upgrade on my dashboard. And seems nothing is wrong with that.

    Anyway Sir, this post, actually your blog, really gives me more insight about wordpress and its tech matters.

  61. Col posted the following on July 24, 2009 at 1:11 pm.

    Thanks for the tips.I upgraded mine and pretty like it so far.
    Col´s last blog ..Probiotic Advantage and The Benefit of Lactobacillus Acidophilus My ComLuv Profile

  62. Tabetha posted the following on July 24, 2009 at 10:37 pm.

    nice,very interesting
    Tabetha´s last blog ..Como Dominar Google en 15 minutos… My ComLuv Profile

  63. Luke Gedeon posted the following on July 24, 2009 at 10:57 pm.

    I am quite happy to help.

  64. Luke Gedeon posted the following on July 25, 2009 at 12:49 am.

    if you have fantastico on your server you could do that, but a WP upgrade also involves dealing with plug-ins, database, and other things.

  65. Caleb posted the following on July 25, 2009 at 4:35 am.

    Awesome tips and tricks, thanks for that… I love wordpress but that is one thing you have to deal with on a continuous basis. but its not that challenging and takes little to no braincells. I love its versatility as well :)
    Caleb´s last blog ..GoodDogAdvice My ComLuv Profile

  66. Luke Gedeon posted the following on July 25, 2009 at 6:56 am.

    Panic,

    The post WordPress 2.7 is here! mentions several new features.

  67. Daunta Lewis posted the following on July 25, 2009 at 3:56 pm.

    The biggest time saver is the possibility to upgrade the WP blog from the control panel! This is the most important update till now…

  68. Karen Swim posted the following on July 25, 2009 at 3:58 pm.

    It’s certanly nice to upgrade WP through the control panel. A big time saver!

  69. Terro posted the following on July 27, 2009 at 5:00 pm.

    saves a ton of time and effort, thanks for the post

  70. Constipation Treatments posted the following on October 8, 2009 at 5:39 am.

    Just upgraded.Thanx!
    Constipation Treatments´s last blog ..Constipation Treatments: Great tips for treatment of constipation My ComLuv Profile

  71. brutus posted the following on October 12, 2009 at 1:08 am.

    Upgraded too..Thanx!

    ceiling fans with lights

  72. warez ddl posted the following on October 19, 2009 at 1:58 am.

    Upgraded too..

  73. John posted the following on December 21, 2009 at 5:02 am.

    thanks a lot,but it didn’t do the trick for me…it says something like: install folder could not be found. I think it’s because i have htdocs and a lot of addon domains :P
    John´s last blog ..Ceiling fan with light: the advantages My ComLuv Profile


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