For several weeks—or even a month or so—whenever I would log in to my wp-admin page to write a new blog post, I would see a warning that I was not running the latest version of WordPress. Originally it indicated that I needed to upgrade to version 2.7.0. Today when I resolved to perform my first upgrade, the warning was already changed to point to 2.7.1. Just as well I didn’t upgrade a week ago!
In its favor, WordPress has (for the most part) excellent documentation on how to upgrade versions, including detailed steps to follow to back up your existing site contents and setup. I did, however, encounter a couple of gotchas.
The first one was when the instructions invited me to log in to phpMyAdmin. They didn’t tell me how. Fortunately, I have enough experience with cPanel that I was able to figure it out relatively quickly (log in to cPanel; click on the MySQL® Databases link; scroll down and click on the phpMyAdmin link). I imagine an average user would have stopped right there, hands raised in disgust.
Without boring you with the rest of the gory details, suffice it to say that it took me the better part of two hours to effect the upgrade. There was one time when I was afraid I had broken something. The instructions advised me to add a fourth key to wp-config.php … but it didn’t tell me I couldn’t do that while I was logged in to my wp-admin panel. I have no doubt that this last sentence will amuse the advanced techies reading this (among whom I generally count myself): Well, duh! Everyone knows you can’t change a configuration file while you’re logged in to the site! Still, if someone with as much technical experience as I have can get caught in this lapse of documentation, then imagine what havoc can be wrought by novices simply following instructions to the best of their abilities.
In all honesty, since WordPress is, after all, Open Source, I’m delighted with how good the vast majority of the upgrade documentation was. In my experience, documentation is often a programmer’s afterthought … if it gets added at all.
So, my advice to you is to seek out help with your WordPress upgrades. My team members get first dibs on my help, but anyone is encouraged to call me if you can’t find anyone else to help you. WordPress is easy enough to install and use, and I shall be offering lots of free training videos in the near future. But there may be times when hiring an outside consultant (like me) makes the most sense.
Happy blogging, everyone!
