Upgrade Your WP Blog Using the “Wordpress Automatic Upgrade” Plugin

December 2, 2008

My website built with the WordPress blog script at http://gifttime.info got hacked recently because I have not upgraded that website WP script as often – after testing it turns out that the hacker hacked into the MySQL database to disable WP functions and displayed the hacker’s page. After removing the installation and re-installing WP from scratch the blog works OK but as soon as I restored the database backup my WP gives me a blank page.

Anyway, this hacking incidence made me search for a better way of upgrading WP than the upgrading function in Fantastico in cPanel – with Fantastico you have to login to the cPanel to make the upgrade. I wanted to look for a WP plugin that does the job.

You know what? I found it!

It is called the “Wordpress Automatic Upgrade” made by Keith Dsouza. Here is the link to the plugin http://techie-buzz.com/wordpress-plugins/wordpress-automatic-upgrade-12-release.html where you can find the download for the most recent version.

BTW, if you have not installed the “One Click Plugin Updater”, you should as it is very handy to install a plugin in its original ZIP format without uncompress it. Here is the link: http://w-shadow.com/blog/2007/10/19/one-click-plugin-updater

Now more about Keith’s “Wordpress Automatic Upgrade” plugin. With this plugin you can do the following tasks with all mouse clicks from your WP admin area – a new link called “Automatic Upgrade” will be created under the “Manage” section:

Backup WP files (a zip file is created for you to download)
Backup WP database (zip file for download)
Put your WP blog in maintenance mode
Deactive all plugins to prepare the final step before the actual upgrade
Download the most recent upgrade files from WordPress.com and unzip these files to write over the older files
Upgrade the database structure
Re-activates the all the plugins and list upgrade summary and logs
Clean up all the upgrade files

All these steps should be done with manual upgrade but they can be accomplished with a few mouse clicks with this amazing plugin. Hope it makes your WP blog life easier as it does for me

December 4, 2008 Update: Site http://gifttime.info works now. The trick to fix it was to do a fresh install and copy the posts section of the old MySQL database (which I saved earlier a copy by exporting using phpMyAdmin) to write over the new MySQL database (which contains only one default post). It works!

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