I like what Ozh said about stressing just how darn reliable WP is, but this is great advice for those very rare challenges that a WP user can face.

The post was written because many of our clients specifically asked us the question. I said that it wasn’t an easy question to answer because it’s not. The fact that it took me so many words to answer the question should speak to that.

My post may not apply to who you see the typical WordPress user as, but we have a large number of business professionals that rely on us to prepare them for success with WordPress. On the subject of upgrading WordPress, I believe I did my best to do just that with what I posted.

I would imagine that if some big company ran a site with WordPress and they asked you for an upgrade strategy, you wouldn’t respond with: “Don’t worry about it, it usually works just fine. Call me if you have a problem.” If you did respond that way, they had better look elsewhere for professional opinions.

Maybe what’s lacking (IMO) to all the “How To Upgrade” guides is a line that would say something like “you know that shit can happen, but 99% of the times upgrading is painless. What I’m going to tell you is to help you deal with the remaining 1% in case it happens”

I think people need to trust WP and be confident with their software, so we (“we” as in “not the average user who has no clue of what has gone moo when something break”) need to make people believe they can trust it.

Just consider for instance your very first line of your (again, very wise) article: “When should a person upgrade their WordPress blog? Frankly, this is not an easy question to answer.” As the average user, I’d go “wow, scary, i’m not going to upgrade then, it’s working fine enough with my old version”

I just think upgrade guides need more positiveness.

I could make a general post about what people should do each day, week, or month, but most people would ignore that. If I make a post about things to do before upgrading WordPress (as I have), people will take notice (and they have).

If something goes wrong on your site after an upgrade, you know how to fix it since you probably wrote most/all of the code that runs on top of core on your site. If something goes wrong on an average WordPress user’s site after an upgrade, they wouldn’t know where to start to fix their site.

While core itself will rarely cause upgrade problems, there are vast numbers of poorly-maintained themes and plugins that will cause problems if you try to upgrade. I’ve seen it dozens of times on sites that I’ve helped people with. Even if the plugin/theme isn’t poorly-maintained, failure to update said plugin/theme would be just the same.

I encountered each of these problems caused by upgrading to 2.8 this past weekend at WordCamp Dallas.

A number of users had plugins that failed on 2.8. Each time, after removing the plugin’s folder, the site would work again. Simple, but even many long-term WordPress users wouldn’t know how to diagnose this nor fix it.

One person I helped was running an older version of the Magazine Basic theme. It worked properly pre-2.8, but it caused problems after updating to 2.8. Come to find out, the version being run has a horrible bug where it actually uses the $post variable as a standard internal variable for the theme. I had to modify the theme’s code to make it function properly. This bug only became an issue after the upgrade to 2.8.

There were also a number of users that had issues with core after the upgrade. They had the disappearing TinyMCE issue. It was easily fixed each time by running Tools > Upgrade > Re-install Automatically followed by clearing all affect browsers’ caches.

I’ve rambled too much. The point is that upgrading core is not risky, tedious, or hazardous; I don’t believe that I’ve suggested that. However, it is not something that should be done on a whim without preparation. While most times it will “just work”, the first time it doesn’t will cause frustration, lost time, and possibly even lost revenue.

While all this is sound advice that just applies anytime (backup, keeping plugins up to date, etc), it makes upgrading the core look like a risky, tedious and hazardous operation.

Come on. All I’ve done for the past 5 years with WP was simply unpack an archive, that’s all. Once in 5 years, with 2.3 and the new taxonomy structure, it broke some functionalities of my theme.

Anyways, good article.

I always play with test sites before touching my main sites. I like using the WP DB Backup plugin as well to get everything.

I’m really looking forward to the theme installer in 2.8

Cheers,
Christina
Website Creation Workshop