How Quickly Do You Upgrade WordPress?

by Tom Ewer May 7^th, 2012 14 Responses

Back in April I wrote an article entitled The Great Plugin Backwards Compatibility Debate, in which I referred to some data showing that a considerable proportion of WordPress users have not installed the latest version (or even the previous latest version, or others before that).

Those figures will be somewhat skewed by inactive sites and the like, but I don’t think anyone could dispute that there are (and probably always will be) a proportion of WordPress users who choose not to upgrade to the latest version of the software.

But why? I would say that there are three common “fears” associated with upgrading:

Tutorials, WordPress Tutorials

4 Simple Steps for Upgrading Old WordPress Sites

by Philip John July 20^th, 2011 4 Responses

At this year’s WordCamp UK conference which took place in the seaside city of Portsmouth, software developer Kieran O’Shea took us through some useful tips for upgrading from older versions of WordPress. Kieran’s presentation is embedded below.

We took these key points from the session;
1. Check for hosting compatibility
Newer versions of WordPress require support for newer versions of PHP and MySQL so you should check the minimum requirements before even downloading a new version of WordPress. If you are unsure whether you meet the requirements you can simply use the template e-mail to ask your hosting provider.
2. Check for plugin compatibility

Plugins

How to Quickly Disable All WordPress Plugins

by Sarah Gooding April 30^th, 2010 2 Responses

Have you ever seen that scary “white screen of death” after upgrading? Maybe the auto-upgrading crapped out on you. Perhaps some of your plugins are conflicting with the upgrade. Here’s a quick way to disable all of your plugins at once, which will mostly likely allow you to log back into your installation and checkout what’s going on. Rename your /plugins/ folder and your /mu-plugins/ folder if using WPMU. This will automatically deactivate your plugins, because the database will assume they don’t exist. Then rename the folders back. You should be able to login and start activating them again. Yes, you can also do this directly through the database, but I think this way is much easier.