6 (IMPORTANT) steps for easily upgrading your WordPress installation
Neville Hobson provides 6 steps for easily upgrading your WordPress installation. With the new one click update function in the newer versions of WordPress, it might seem like an easy solution to update. But, it is actually a really good idea to follow these six steps. Especially backup your DB and disable all the plugins. If you do not disable the plugins and one of them are not compatible with the new WP vesion, you might not be able to login to your backend. Further to that, if you haven’t got easy access to your files via FTp or other means, it might be a cumbersome process to remove the non-compatible plugin files in order to restore your access.
1. Back up the WordPress MySQL database.
2. Disable all plugins (yes, every single one) and revert the theme to the WordPress default aka Kubrick.
3. My hosting service, DreamHost, offers a simple, effective and reliable software installer known as 1-Click. So I run DreamHost 1-Click and wait for email confirmation that the upgrade has been done. That usually takes less than 10 minutes.
4. Next, log in to the blog and immediately re-enable the two most important plugins: Akismet and Bad Behaviour, the first line of defence against the spammers and other bad guys.
5. Re-enable the usual theme. (In my case, that’s Thesis. I didn’t enable it immediately as I installed new version 1.5.1 first.)
6. Re-activate all my other plugins one by one, testing after each one to be sure they work (here’s a list of the plugins I have running, all of which work with WP 2.8).
