Easily Upgrade WordPress with the WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin

With the recent release of WordPress 2.3, the WordPress team took a popular and much needed WordPress feature known as tagging and integrated it directly into the software itself.  This is one of a few recent examples where WordPress has actually built popular existing plugins directly into their software. 

To me, this is crucial to the growth of WordPress, as plugins are often bulky and can have a lot of extra code that is not needed.  This can cause a lot more resources to be used than would otherwise be required, as well as cause some security vulnerabilities.  In other words, the more plugins that are built directly into the software, the better off we will be as WordPress users. 

Another plugin that I think is a strong candidate for integration into the WordPress software is a fairly new plugin from Keith over at Techie Buzz called WordPress Automatic Upgrade.   WPAU is an incredible plugin that had been attempted on several occasions, but Keith was the first person to create a reliable way to automate the process for upgrading WordPress.  If you already tried the plugin and had problems, you may have been using an old version.  I have used the latest version on 3 different sites and it worked perfectly, so I recommend you give it another trying using the newest version of the plugin. 

In order to use this plugin, simply upload and activate it.   Once activated, you will see a new option under Manage called Automatic Upgrade.  The plugin walk you through all the steps needed to upgrade WordPress, including checking over your current installation, putting your blog into maintenance mode, and even grabbing the latest version of WordPress from the official download page.

If you have a standard WordPress installation, I highly recommend using this plugin to keep your WordPress software up to date.   As has been previously documented all over the blogosphere, it can be a significant security risk to use an outdated version of WordPress.