Guide To Blogging

Upgrading WordPress And Other Odd Bits

For as long as I’ve been blogging (which isn’t long compared to some, but awhile in my mind) I’ve never actually upgraded any of my blogs. If/when I set up a new blog I generally upload whatever the latest version of WordPress happens to be and leave it at that.

However…

I recently had one of my other blogs hacked and in all honesty it was only a fluke that I discovered it. It’s a blog I don’t tend to very often but I went to log in the other day and other than the dashboard I couldn’t get any of my other admin pages to load, after swearing and cursing at it for awhile, I left it and came back to it at a later time - I did eventually manage to get into my manage posts page and went to edit a post (the reason I wanted to login to this blog in the first place) it just so happened that I hit the code tab (I generally use the visual tab when doing my posts unless there’s a reason I need to put in actual code etc) while I was in the code pane I happened to notice that underneath my original post was all this other code - linking to adult sites and the like (this was hidden code - that is it doesn’t show up in the actual post where it can be seen but is hidden inside - or however the hell that type of stuff works - it’s way beyond me) anyway I went on to discover that a large number of my posts all had this hidden code crap in it - which as you can probably imagine didn’t impress me all that much.

I fixed all that - got onto my hosting account and told them - they fixed stuff for me too - really quickly I might add - and changed passwords etc which leads me to today…

I logged back into that blog and I’m still having trouble getting pages to load - though as far as I can see there’s nothing out of the ordinary there. So I figured what the hell - this blog doesn’t do much anyway, if it comes to it I’m not going to lose anything by deleting it entirely so I’ll go for an upgrade and see what happens.

Now while I haven’t done it on that particular blog yet I did just upgrade a test blog - just to see how it’s done. I actually came across a plugin that did it all for me - WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin - It worked really easily - just click some buttons and your done so for the most part that makes life pretty easy. Though I have a couple of things to point out.

This automatically upgrades to the latest version of WordPress and considering all the fuss around at the moment about WordPress 2.5 if you don’t want that version - don’t use this plugin (I just had a quick look at it on my test blog and it looked okay to me - but I don’t really post on that blog so I’m probably not the best judge) also I didn’t have any plugins installed on that blog so I’m not sure how that will affect things - according the the instructions - this plugin automatically deactivates the plugins and then activates them again afterwards.

You can use this automatic upgrade plugin either manually - where I guess you follow each step - so you can double check etc - or automatically (which I did) where you click a button and it just goes off and does it. For my next attempt I will probably try it manually - but due to my first go being on a test blog with few posts and no plugins the automatic seemed the way to go.

Less Than 10 Minutes Later 

I’ve just come back to edit this post to add..

Using the plugin recommended above I just upgraded my other blog (that has multiple posts and plugins etc) using the manual method and it worked quickly and easily - as far as I can tell there’s no problems - everything is where it should be though it didn’t re-activate my plugins so I have to go and do that manually - thought that’s probably a good thing as no doubt some of them won’t work with 2.5.1 or will need to be upgraded etc