Automatically updating your Wordpress install
by Sapphire (April 29, 2008)
So Wordpress 2.5 doesn’t come with the ability to auto-update the whole installation after all. It also has a tendency to eat your posts if it doesn’t like the way you click publish. Gah!
I’ve found a plugin that upgrades your install automatically, but it’s got some bugs. Plus, one that I found - but there’s a workaround. First, using it in the non-automatic mode where it guides you through the “5 Easy steps” but you have to click “next” each time, worked perfectly for me. It’s the automatic mode where I had trouble: it doesn’t upgrade your plugins when it says it does.
After doing the automatic upgrade, you get a window which has two links (I’ve changed the links to bold formatting because otherwise they’d be the actual links for you to click and upgrade my database, which doesn’t sound like a good idea):
Congratulations!!! All the files have been upgraded to the latest version. Please CLICK HERE TO COMPLETE DATABASE UPGRADE (opens in new window and will show you a upgrade link only if database has to be upgraded) and come back here to reactivate your plugins
PLEASE CLICK HERE TO RE-ACTIVATE YOUR PLUGINS. AFTER YOU HAVE UPGRADED DATABASE
At this point, you want to click the first link and follow the instructions in the window it launches (you’ll have to log in again, too, if your server is configured like both of the hosts I use). Then you come back to this window to click the second link.
Only when I clicked it I got a “Are you sure you want to do that? Please try again” error. The plugins did not get reactivated.
Here’s the workaround, until the developer fixes this: you’ll be returned to the beginning screen (possibly after an option that says “Seems you have not performed cleanup process” or something like that - sorry, I had everything all nicely saved for this post, and then Wordpress 2.5.1 ate it for brunch and I have no more blogs to upgrade so I can’t recreate the error. But it’s worded something like that. Go ahead and click that link, whatever it says.
Now you’re definitely back at the beginning instead of on the “Congrats, you’re done” page. So you want to start all over with the auto install. This time, when you get to the page with the two links, ignore the database one and click the one to reactivate plugins. Now it will work: it’ll reactivate every plugin you had active, except any that give a fatal error with the new version of Wordpress.
And in case you’ve never, ever heard it before somehow back up your installation before you start to play with this plugin. That way the worst that can happen if you have to reinstall the backup and upgrade manually.
Posted in Blogging, Tools
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