Smart Way To Upgrade Your WordPress

WordPress is one of the powerful CMS (Content Management System) for blogger. Which easily to upgrade, maintain, extend and customized. Upgrading WordPress is easy, you just click it from Admin Dashboard > Updates and press the Update Automatically button. But in some case this won’t work.

If you have many plugins and customization, WordPress automatically updates won’t work, and to be honest i don’t know why. So what happen if your update process is stop in the middle of the process? Well your site will be inaccessible. So if you got this issue, don’t panic! Just go to your cPanel or ftp program or anything to access your files in the server, all you have to do is delete .maintain file from the root. And your site will be live again.

Using upgrade automatically feature is convenient, but not for me. I prefer to upgrade it manually, because it’s much more safe (IMHO). And the other reason is i’ve done a customization in WordPress core, so if i use automatically upgrade it will overwrite all my code, and i don’t want that happen.

Well how to smart way upgrade your WordPress? Follow my guidelines below:

1. First before you have done anything, do BACKUP! Yes, Backup all your files and database. Remember,shit happen!
2. Go to WordPress release information and change log. You can access it here.
3. Take your times to read what have been changed and which files are revised/changed. For example the latest WordPress released when i write this article is 3.0.2, and the release info is here.
4. As you scroll down a little bit you will see “List of Files Revised”, so we only do overwrite this files.
5. Download the latest WordPress from download page, and extract it, get the revised files, and upload it via FTP.
6. You are done! And Your WordPress upgraded.

Note: If you have a modified code in WordPress core code and it will be overwritten, i suggest you to use file comparator and see where is the different and copy over your code.