I saw an interesting Tweet this morning from Mathew Ingram, a columnist for the Globe and Mail. He had just used the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin to update his install to version 2.7. Being a couple versions behind the most recent release of WordPress myself, it sounded like a heck of a good thing to try out. Especially ‘cuz uploading whole new WP installs is a bit of a chore.
That, incidentally, is something to consider — I already know what the upgrade process is like. So I know what has to go into a plugin to make it work well. And does it ever work well! It creates backups, ensures that your site is in a maintenance mode before upgrading, copies files over to their correct locations, and even nags you to clean up the residual stuff afterwards. It prompts you for every step along the way — none of this totally-automatic-and-we-hope-your-site-doesn’t-break-along-the-way sort of stuff. For control freaks who are just too lazy to do their own upgrades (cough like me cough), this is pretty cool stuff.
Sadly, I also had to heavily wrestle with a Flickr Tag update that had totally exploded and refused to upgrade or activate at all. Ended up having to wipe out the files from the system as well as the Flickr Tag entries in the wp_options table. Not a particularly fun thing to do, and I can only imagine how hard it would be for someone who doesn’t know how.
Either way, I’m all up-to-date now, and it’s running really nicely. I’m looking forward to using the Automatic Updater from now on!
