Wordpress upgrade

Lmao_Man

I've a Wordpress site that is fairly out of date at this stage.There's also a few plugins that need updating.

I know that I should update asap but I'm just worried that something will go wrong and I won't be able to get the site back up.

Not sure if my current theme will work either with the new version of WP.

What's the best way of updating everything ? Is it just to backup the site first and if something goes wrong just put it back to normal via FTP? Don't want my google rankings to fall if the site is down for a while.

Thanks

Trojan

Back up the site completely first (outside of WordPress). Log in via FTP (your hosting company should have info on how to do that), and copy your entire site down so you have an offline copy of all your files. Then log into your database - most hosting companies give you access to "phpMyAdmin" control panel - and "export" your database - easiest is to export as SQL and choose options Save as File and Zipped. Again, hosting company should tell you how to do that.

After you save those somewhere safe (e.g. save to DVD) then you can go ahead with the update. One approach, if you're nervous about potential problems, is to disable all of your plugins first, before updating, and turning them on one-by-one afterwards - so if one breaks the site you know immediately where the fault is. You might find this video on how to fix broken WordPress plugins useful.

As for the theme, one thing you can do to avoid catastrophic failure (i.e. no working theme) is to simply install one of the default themes before upgrading - TwentyTen or TwentyEleven) - WordPress will fall back to the default theme if your own theme is broken, so you'll still have a live site, albeit not your custom design.

HTH.

Sparks

Wordpress also gives you the option to back up the site from within wordpress itself (it's built-in now, but earlier versions can use plugins to do the same thing). It's worth doing that as well as the full backups.

That being said, I've never had a wordpress.org update go sideways on me, and I've done a few dozen now at this stage, on several sites with a fair spread of plugins and themes. It's a fairly solid bit of PHP, it has to be said...

Lmao_Man

Thanks for the replies

Still unsure if I want to risk updating to be honest.Always say I'll do it but end up not going for it.

I always thought wordpress themes need to be updated to work with a new wordpress update but maybe I'm wrong.Not sure if my theme has been updated.

Thanks.

Sparks

Actually, using the new 3.2, I have to say it's worth the upgrade. It's a cleaner interface, even if I can't seem to get Zen mode to work in the editor...

stevenmu

When you take your backup of everything, use it to setup a development environment locally. This has the double benefit of making sure your backup is correct and complete, and you can do a trial upgrade on it first to make sure everything runs smoothly and iron out any issues.

Sparks

+1 to that, though it tends to be a pain unless your running a *nix box at home...

stevenmu

I've never tried Wordpress tbh, I just kind of assumed XAMPP (which I've also never used) would make it pretty simple.

Lmao_Man

stevenmu wrote: »

When you take your backup of everything, use it to setup a development environment locally. This has the double benefit of making sure your backup is correct and complete, and you can do a trial upgrade on it first to make sure everything runs smoothly and iron out any issues.

That's a great idea actually.

That would allow me to update everything without changing the live site wouldn't it ?

Will have to look into how to do that now though.

Sparks

Lmao_Man wrote: »

That would allow me to update everything without changing the live site wouldn't it ?

Yup. If you're running linux and have the disk space, it's something you should definitely be doing. (In fact, do it twice - have one mirror directory where an rsync cronjob keeps the directory comments sync'd with the server every night and another cronjob syncs the databases, and then when you want to make changes, clone that directory and db and test with those. Mind you, it'll be slow if it's a really huge site... but you can always leave out certain things, like photo directories and so on. For example, my training blog has 930Mb of files after eight years of running, but of those, 760Mb are photos, and 121Mb are plugin files, which don't change often, so your nightly rsync run is quite small. And even the database isn't *that* large at 48Mb. (Even my largest blog only runs to 210Mb in database - for a 4am download, that's not so bad).

Will have to look into how to do that now though.

On linux, it's fairly easy. Install apache, php and mysql, download the Wordpress.org install file, set up a base install of wordpress and import the backup file from your blog (the one you made inside wordpress), copy in the files from your blog and you're done. Well, mostly

Lmao_Man

I'm on vista

And my site is only around 20 articles that are around 450 words each so it would be well less than your site

Trojan

Lmao_Man wrote: »

I'm on vista

And my site is only around 20 articles that are around 450 words each so it would be well less than your site

Upgrade Vista to Win7 if you can, much better OS.

This should be useful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_WAMPs