Blog

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In this tutorial I will take you through managing the various types of content on your blog.

I will show you how to work with posts, pages and comments in their various guises

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Here is your exercise to go with this tutorial:

Remember to do a full backup before you start.

• Find out what your current version of WordPress is, find out what the latest release of WordPress is, hint the main wordpress.org site.
• If applicable upgrade to the latest version of WordPress
• Check if any of your plugins are out of date, is so update them.  Do some manually and some using the automatic method
• Ask your theme developer if your theme is updated to work with your current version of WordPress, if not obtain the latest version and apply it.  NOTE if you have made changes to the theme code, you will need to reflect these in the latest version.

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Lets discuss this module in the comments section below.
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It is a very rare thing that a theme needs to be updated in line with an upgrade to WordPress, but it does happen, the significant changes to WordPress between 2.5 and 2.6 were one occasion, many themes were left running redundant code and as a result needed to be updated.

Identifying A Theme Upgrade

Unlike core files and plugins, there is no notification that your theme needs to be updated.  You will need to be aware of changes to your site, parts of the theme not working after an upgrade to your WordPress core file or plugins.

I recommend that you get into the habit of giving your theme a quick once over after updating WordPress or plugins.

So You’ve updated WP and It All Looks Terrible

So you have updated a component of WordPress and something is broken on your theme, what do you do?

First up, your theme developers should be taking part in the beta testing  programme of WordPress if they are worth their salt.  They should be testing and upgrading their offering in line with a WP change, and should have those fixes ready when the upgrades come out if their themes stops working.

When you spot the problem visit your theme suppliers support forum, they may have a theme update, download and apply this.

If there is no fix, notify the theme developer of your situation, again if they are any good they should analyse your problem an provide a fix.

If there is no support forthcoming in a timely fashion I recommend you roll back your recent upgrade using the backup you took (you did do a backup didn’t you 🙂 )  Then hold off doing the upgrade until your theme is compatible with the version you want to use.

Plugin Problems

Many themes rely on plugins to provide specific functionality, sometimes after upgrading a plugin part of the theme will stop running,  You need to take similar step as you did for a problem with core WordPress files.

• Check on the theme developers site for a fix to teh plugin problem
• Report the problem if no fix is available
• Roll back the plugin to an earlier version NOTE plugin developers usually keep a number of versions of their plugins available to download

Have You Modified Your Theme?

If you have made manual changes to your theme please remember these will not be reflected in the new theme you install so you should take note of any changes and re-implement these on your updated instllation.

How To Update Your Theme

Using the ftp client of your choice, navigate to wp-content/themes and create a new directory such as themename_v2, then upload your files to that directory, return to the dashboard of your site and navigate to appearance -> themes, and select the new theme being careful to look for the correct path.

VIDEO: Updating Your Theme

There is no video for this part of the tutorial, a whole module in the course is dedicated to updating, and installing themes, this will be in week 5.

Discuss This Post

Lets discuss this module in the comments section below.

Next In The Series

Next in the series is a practical exercise to ensure you have your site up to date.

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Plugins are one of the most exciting part of WordPress, thousands of developers are writing plugins which extend the base functionality of WordPress to do many interesting things.  If you have a problem with WordPress chances are that there is a plugin for that problem.

With the huge flexibility of the plugin system comes an administration overhead,  you must keep your plugins up to date.  This tutorial and associated screencast videos will take you through the process of keeping them up to date.

Please note I will talk at length about plugins in the module plugins like a pro week week 6.

Why Update Your Plugjns

Plugins are updated to add new functionality, to patch bugs and to keep up with changes to the underlying WordPress code.  As wordpress functions are updated, plugins which rely on these functions must also be updated.

When To Update Your Plugins

The majority of your plugins will tell you when an update is available.  A red icon will appear next to the plugin tab on your dashboard as shown.

If you go to the plugins->installed  section, and you will be able to see the plugin(s) requiring attention.

How To Update Manual/Automatic

In the same way that the WordPress core files can be automatically or manually updated, you can update your plugins in two ways.  I wil take you through both methods.

Don’t Touch That Dial Until You Have Heard This Important Message

You will get sick of me saying this before the end of this course, but please perform a backup before you update your plugins, a partial backup of wp-content/plugins will do,  Remember plugins often change the database so a backup of that is useful too.

Automatically Updating Plugins

To automatically update a plugin navigate to the plugin in question from plugins->installed and then click on the upgrade automatically link.  WordPress will go off and download the new plugin files, unpack them and install them.  It will remove the old version of the plugin and activate the plugin if it is already running or give you an option to activate if it is not currently running.

Manually Updating A Plugin

To manually update a plugin, you need to obtain a copy of the plugin files and upload them to your site.

The plugin files will be available to downbload from the developers site or from the WordPress plugin directory.  To get the download goto plugins -> installed from the  dashboard and then click on view version link (see below) and navigate to either the wordpress.org page for the plugin or plugin homepage, take note of the new version and download that.

Once you have downloaded the plugin update, uncompress it and upload it to your hosting service using your preferred FTP client.  I like to disable the plugin first before uploading the new files.

Please read the installation instuctions which come with the plugin, there may be some additional steps such as running a configuration process in the dashboard,  an example of htis is the “excellent all in one SEO plugin”  you need to re-nebale the plugin from the dashboard after updating it.

Once you have uploaded the files return to the plugin dashboard and re-enable the chosen plugin.  The upgrade available messages will be gone if the installatio is a sucess.

VIDEO: Updating Your Plugins

Here is the screencast video to show you how to keep all 0f your plugins up to date.  Running time approx 7 minutes.

[S3 bucket=wpoc text=View the video>>]upgradingplugins.mp4[/s3]

Discuss This Post

Lets discuss this module in the comments section below.

Next In The Series

In the next session in this tutorial we will be discussing upgrading your theme

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In this part of the upgrade tutorial I would like to take you through the process of upgrading your core WordPress files and database.

Why Upgrade?

As I have already mentioned WordPress is a constantly evolving system.  New functions are added, bugs in existing code are fixed and security loopholes are filled almost as quickly as the hackers discover them.

It is because of this that it is advisable to keep your WordPress installation at the latest version.

When To Upgrade

Like an obidient automaton, you will upgrade when you are told to 🙂

WordPress has an update notification system which compares your current version with the currently available latest release and adds an upgrade available banner at the top of your dashboard like the one below when an update is available.

Some people don’t like the intrusive nature of this notification and install plugins to disable this feature, I think it is still very important to keep up to date with the latest version, so I recommend signing up for an email notiffcation when the latest stable version is released.  This can be done from http://wordpress.org/download/

What Happens During An Update

When WordPress release an update to the code,  you will need to replace all of the files in your blog root, wp-admin, wp-includes and to a lesser extend wp-content.  There will then be a script to run which will make any updates to the database.

Before You Begin

Before you begin to upgrade your core WordPress install please backup your installation.  Please refer to module one backup and recovery for details.

Automatically Updating WordPress

The latest versions of WordPress have an automatic update facility.  Using this process the new files are downloaded to your hosting serverand saved into the directory /wp-content/upgrade.  The files are unpacked and a script is run to move them to their required location.  Lastly a script will be run to update the back end database

All of this happens seamlessly whilst your blog is online, and excellent advance in WordPress administration in my opinion.  The downside is you have zero control of the process.  Whilst I have never had a failure using automatic update, I wonder what would happen if the process fell over mid way through the procedure leaving you with a partially updated and possibly not working blog.  Thats is why I am also teaching you how to to a manual update. Also I have noticed a number of hosting companies do not allow you to download the required files for an automatic update, so you may be forced to use the manual method detailed below.

Manually Updating WordPress

Same thing goes as the automatic update, please do a backup first.

Download and uncompess the latest version of WordPress from http://wordpress.org/download/ The files will come as either a zip file or as a .tar.gz.  These are both archive file types, if you are planning to do you work from a PC or MAC, zip is probably best (Mac users please feel free to tell me I am wrong in the forums ,are tar files a beter option for the Mac?).  If you are going straight to linux/unix with your WordPress install then tar.gz is probably a better format.

Unarchive  the files and prepare to copy them to your WordPress hosting server.

Things to note before you start renaming and overwriting files:

• Once you start this process your site will not work correctly until you are done, schedule the upgrade at a quiet time
• Have your backups handy

HANDY HINT: Create a file called index.html in your blog root containing a message saying your site is down, this will capture all visitors to the root of your blog and let them know you are updating it.  Remember to delete this at the end of the process.

The first stage of the manual update process is to delete or (my preferred method) to rename the directories wp-admin and wp-includes.  This will remove all of the old system files and ensure only the most up to date file are left. I rename my directories using my ftp client filezilla.

Next I upload the WordPress files overwriting the existing install, paying particular attention NOT to overwrite wp-config.php.  If you do this your intall will not know how to connect to the database.  If you are using one of the default themes please note they will be updated too so any changes you have made will be overwritten.

Once the file are all uploaded, you need to run the upgrade script.  This is located at http://{YOURBLOG}/wp-admin/upgrade.php

The script will be run and any updates requried to the database made.  The upgrade is now complete.

Test, test and retest your blog to ensure everything is okay, pay particular attention to you plugins to see if they are working as expected.

Manual Update Resources

Check out the following pages from WordPress on installing and updateing your system http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress

Rolling Back An Update

If you have problems with the update, either manual or automatic, you must roll back your system to the previous version, to do this:

1. Restore your database
2. Restore your filebase

I guess you now see why backup and recovery was the first topic of this training course.  We will be doing many things which may require a restore.   Refer to those modules to see how to do this.  Both have been updated so both need to be recovered, do not be tempted to only restore your filebase.

VIDEO: How To Upgrade Your WordPress Core Files

Here is the screencast video to show you exactly how to update your core system.  Running time approx 5 minutes.

[S3 bucket=wpoc text=View the video>>]corefiles.mp4[/s3]

Discuss This Post

If you would like to discuss this tutorial in more detail, please leave a comment below.

Next In the series

The next post in this series takes you through updating your plugins.

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In this series of blog posts and supporting screen cast videos, I would like to take you through the process of updating the various components of WordPress.  I will look at upgrading WordPress itself, keeping your plugins at the latest level and lastly updating your theme to ensure it is compatible with new versions of WordPress.

This series of tutorials comes with screencasts as part of the WordPress Owners Club.

Why It Is So Important to Keep Your Site Up To Date

WordPress and the extensions of WordPress (themes and plugins) are in a constant state of development, it is important to keep your site up to date for the following reasons:

• To install new security updates to close know loopholes
• To install updates to patch bugs in the software which may stop your site functioning correctly
• To take advantage of new functionality
• To keep your site at a level of code supported by the wider community of developers i.e. as WordPress moves on so will the plugin and theme code, you risk not being able to run your favourite plugin if you are not at the correct level

Later releases of WordPress have built in indicators to let you know when to update certain parts of your  system require attention via an update, the rest of this tutorial will take you through those components and how how to keep you site up to date.

The Three Components Requiring Updates

There are three components of your blog which will require updates on an on-going basis, your WordPress system itself, both the file base and database, your plugins and to a lesser extent your theme.

Updating WordPress

WordPress is in a constant state of development as I have already said.  New additions to the system are being made on a regular basis to add functionality, to fix know errors and to block security loopholes.  The later point makes it extremely important to keep your blog’s software at the latest version.

WordPress has a built in notification system where it will check for the latest available version against your installed version.  If there is a newer version you will see a message like this at the top of your site:

Finding Out Your Current WordPress Version

The quick way to find out your current WordPress version is to visit your dashboard.

Manually or Automatically Updating

There are two methods to update WordPress, you can either manually upload new files and run the update process or you can click on the automatic update button to do it for you.  I will discuss both methods later in this tutorial.

Updating Plugins

Just like the WordPress core system, plugins are in a constant state of development, along with the bug fixes, system improvements and pluging security holes, plugin developers need to keep their offering in line with WordPress as well.

Functionality of a plugin may cease to work if the underlying wordPress system is relies on is changed.

Updating Themes

Probably the least likely thing you will need to update of the three, but it is my experience that themes sometimes have issues after major updates of the core WordPress system, so please bear this in mind as you update other components.

Themes tends to have issues because they are running outdated calls to WordPress to retrieve content, this then causes parts of the theme to stop working.

There is no automatic check for theme compatibility like there is for the code base and plugins, so you will need to do some investigation. Check on the support section of the theme developers site to see if there are any issues, they often release patches to fix any problems that are reported.

Often themes are reliant on plugins to provide certain functionality, if you see problems with your theme after a plugin update, again refer to the theme developers website to see if there is a know issue or drop a support request to them in the support forum or via email.  The majority of developers are only too happy to help.

Rest Of This Tutorial

The rest of this tutorial will focus on the practical side of updating the three components; WordPress core, plugins and themes.  I will take you through identifying upgrade opportunities, getting the updates files and applying them.

Discuss This Post

If you would like to discuss this tutorial in more detail, please leave a comment.

Next In The Series

In the next part of this tutorial I discuss updating your core WordPress files.

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