Upgrading to WordPress 2.6.1? How?

August 19th, 2008 · 1 Comment · How to, WordPress, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Upgrades

I missed the opportunity to upgrade to WordPress 2.6. Now WordPress 2.6.1 was released on Friday, August 15, 2008. It fixed a bunch of bugs. These include “several improvements for international users. Styling of the admin for right-to-left languages is much improved thanks to the efforts of the Farsi and Hebrew translation teams, and a mysterious gettext bug caused by certain PHP configurations is now fixed.

For IIS users, 2.6.1 fixes several permalink problems. Image insertion problems in the Press This feature experienced by IE users are also fixed. Of note to everyone is a fix for a performance bug in the admin where those with a lot of plugins would experience slowness on some pages.” You may also want to find out the full list of over 60 fixes to see what WordPress 2.6.1 has to offer.

I just upgraded my existing WordPress version to WordPress 2.6.1 a moment ago. Everything went smoothly. If you are ready to upgrade to WordPress 2.6.1, then you may find the following steps useful:

First of all you need to check whether you meet the minimum requirement. You can use the following code to check your minimum requirement.

<?phpinfo();?>

Here is what you need to do: Save the above code in a file as checkphpNmysql.php or any name you want. Then upload that file to your public_html directory, and run it as http://www.yoursitename.com/checkphpNmysql.php in your browser to find out your PHP version and MySQL version right away. Make sure you replace yoursitename with your own domain name.

If you fulfill the minimum requirement, then you have two choices: (1) You can get WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin to upgrade for you in about two minutes. I’ve never tried it before so you are taking that choice on your own risk. (2) Alternatively you may upgrade to WordPress 2.6.1 manually.

Next back up your database. Follow These instructions if you don’t know how.

Use any FTP to back up ALL of your files in your WordPress directory to your PC (personal computer).

Check your backups to see they are usable.

Make sure you deactivate All your plugins.

Download and unzip WordPress 2.6.1 here to your PC.

Delete the old WordPress files except the following files:
- wp-config.php file
- wp-content folder
- wp-images folder (only older installations from 1.5.x days will have this folder)
- wp-includes/languages/folder; if you are using a language file, and it is here rather than in wp-content/languages/, do not delete this folder (you might want to move your language files to wp-content/languages/ for easier upgrading in the future)
- .htaccess file (if you have added custom rules to your .htaccess, do not delete it)
- Custom Content and/or Plugins (if you have any images or other custom content or Plugins inside the wp-content folder, do not delete them).

Upload your unzipped wordpress-2.6.1 files to your WordPress directory.

Run http://www.yoursitename.com/wp-admin/ as your normal login. From there it will direct you whether you need to upgrade your database or not. Make sure you replace yoursitename with your own domain name.

If your WordPress is resided in a subdirectory called blog, then you need to run it as http://www.yoursitename.com/blog/wp-admin/ or http://www.blog/yoursitename.com/wp-admin/ depending on how you set up your blog.