Lifesaving Tips Before Upgrading to WordPress 3.0

Tweet

The latest and greatest WordPress 3.0 is out today. Woo hoo! Thelonious is it’s name, after one of my (and presumably Matt’s) favorite jazz pianists

The WordPress site servers must have been maxed out harder than AT&Ts during the iPhone debacle last week all with the excited bloggers and web geeks running to upgrade their site. This was a major release containing “1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements” and adding a ton of new features. Even with the community’s extensive release-candidate testing, any upgrade comes with the possibility of issues, possibly nasty ones, cropping up.

In spite of the ease of install touted in the official release announcement post there are a few things to remember when doing any site upgrade. So, just as a reminder here are a few things you should be doing before you upgrade.

Backup your database

Always a keen idea to be doing regularly anyway. After all, you don’t want to lose that great post draft you wrote last week, right?

If you want to make backups painless and automatic, get the WP-DB-Backup plugin. It’s a simple install and gives you the ability to regularly backup your site. I recommend setting the options to do a weekly backup, emailed to you.

Also, I would advise doing a regularly monthly full backup of your database(s), just in case. This is easily done via the PHPMyAdmin control panel and it can also be automated through your hosting control panel.

I have personally restored WordPress sites from both types of backups and have felt confident that all my schtuff got saved and re-added correctly.  So it’s nice to have that taken care of.

Back Up Your Site Files

Maybe I’m just paranoid, but any time I do a major change like this, I back up my entire website.Most hosting companies run routine backups, but I never rely on them to be current.  To be sure, do it yourself.

Again this is easily done through your hosting company’s control panel in the File Manager. Just select the entire root-level directory and archive it as a zip or gzip/bzip/tar file. I save this outside of my html directory structure so it is not accessible from the internet and I usually download a copy monthly just in case of catastrophic failures.  Probably overkill, but I like to control.

Armed with a backed up database and your site files, you really are in pretty good shape as far as being able to account for any corrupt installations or what-not.

I hope and trust that you’re already doing this and my words are just reinforcement, like a nagging parent reminding you to wear your seatbelt. *CLICK!*

Good luck, and enjoy WordPress 3.0. It really is easy to upgrade!

Tagged as: backup, database, plugins, wordpress 3.0