Back in December, I did a blog post about Updating to WordPress 2.3.1. I noted in that post that I waited a long time to do the update because I knew it would be a somewhat painful process. I probably spent an hour getting the stage set (backing things up including the database), and reading and re-reading the instructions.
I then completed the actual update in about 2 hours. Not horrible, but still not something you do on a whim. Ironically, 2.3.2 came out within a week or so of my doing the update. But, I was not in any hurry to do it again. So I waited.
It was with some pain that I saw that 2.5.1 was available, and saw the dreaded words indicating that it included an important security update. That’s a good way to get my attention enough to contemplate investing a few hours in something, so I decided to go through it all again.
Given the expected downtime, I set aside a few hours of my Saturday to get this done. Saturday afternoon I went to the Upgrading WordPress page on the WordPress site. That’s when I saw it:
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What? Update in about 2 minutes? You are so full of … What the heck I decided, let’s give it a try. So I clicked on the link to go get the WordPress Automatic Update plugin. I then tried it out.
Well, it definitely took longer than 2 minutes, but I was actually done in about 10 minutes. When I was done with it, I sat there a bit stunned. I had geared up for a major grueling task, and it was over in no time.
Note that the plugin does backup your entire blog and your database right at the beginning. So if anything goes wrong you should be able to restore things relatively easily.
The only odd thing in the plugin is that when I got to the last screen where it was supposed to enable my plugins again, I got an error message. I ended up having to manually reenable the plugins (which is easy of course). I then spent some time checking out the blog to make sure that everything was ok, which it was.
All in all though, this is one phenomenal tool. Don’t even think about doing an update the old way anymore, unless you have reason to believe that you have done some custom things to your blog that the tool won’t be able to deal with.
