Upgrading to Wordpress 2.7.1 Pains

I used to use a great Wordpress plugin called Wordpress Automatic Upgrade, or WPAU to its, many, fans. A plugin whiich used to be recommened by the Wordpress site itself becuase it did what it did so well.

It really was a great plugin and meant you could upgrade your Wordpress blogging platform in about 10 minutes flat, with minimal site downtime. This plugin also backed up your database and all WP installation files and encoouraged you to download them, just in case something went wrong.

I upgraded to WP 2.7 in a flash via WPAU, and with no hiccups. Great.

Enter little message on the WP dashboard telling me to upgrade to 2.7.1. OK I thought, let's see if WPAU can do it. Alas no. Aah.

What followed was a mornings downloading of all my site files for backup purposes. That done, and remember all if this used to take 10 minutes, I tried the new built in upgrade feature. No dice. Apparently I needed to 'chown' some folders via a quaint little command line program called 'putty'. I'm good at chmod, but no chown.

So I did not bother with the chown thing and decided to do it the old way via an FTP system, deleting and upgrading everything after having to manually disable all the plugins individually because the mass deactivation didn't want to play ball, and the caching system did not really want to be deactivated, so I downloaded it to my hard drive and deleted it from my server. It worked fine after I re-uploaded the plugin to my newly upgraded WP installation, thankfully.

After around a morning's work, my updated Wordpress installation was running. But what a fuss, from ten minutes to around 3 to 4 hours. I've only got two more sites to do luckily, but I feel sorry for those who have 10+ sites to deal with.

Still, some people should be OK with the built in upgrade, although others have been having problems.

So, Matt Mullenweg and all the WP development team - please provide built in upgrading functionality to Wordpress, including the possibility to back up all files and the database from within Wordpress. After all, if WPAU could do it, I'm sure you can find a way to do it too!

By the way: Wordpress rocks awesomely! I love it. Shame the shiny new WP 2.7 is, in some respects, a step back into the past.