WordPress Hacks » WordPress Upgrade

WordPress 2.9 Officially Released

Kyle Eslick — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 01:18:58 +0000

If you’ve visited your WordPress site’s dashboard in the past 24 hours you probably noticed that WordPress 2.9 is now available to download. I know many people like to wait to upgrade to give theme and plugin authors a chance to create updates, but the new changes in WordPress 2.9 seem to be playing nice with everything based upon all the reports I’ve read. I’ve also upgraded most of my websites that use WordPress without any theme or plugin conflicts.

If you are interested in learning about what is new in WordPress 2.9, there is a great write up posted on Quick Online Tips which you can view here. The post features the following new features:

Thrash It
Image Editor
Batch Plugin Update
Easier Video Embeds
Database Optimization Support

What is your favorite new feature in WordPress 2.9?

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How Long Should You Wait to Upgrade WordPress?

Kyle Eslick — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 01:35:58 +0000

With the recent release of WordPress 2.8 this past week, there has been a number of complications and/or frustrations from the WordPress community, leading to a lot of discussion about how long you should wait to upgrade WordPress when a new branch is released. Historically the WordPress team has always done a great job of testing their releases, which I think lead to a strong confidence from the WordPress community when it was time to upgrade. Combine that with the one-click upgrade option that is now built into WordPress and the annoying tag reminding you to upgrade, and you’ve got a huge number of people who upgraded to WordPress 2.8 immediately upon its release.

Unfortunately, with each new WordPress branch comes changes which sometimes break WordPress plugins, create problems with the WordPress theme you are using, and usually includes changes to the code. If you upgrade before the themes or plugins you rely on have been updated, this can cause problems. The iThemes team recently touched on this subject with their post, When Should I Upgrade WordPress? Their post also includes five helpful things that need done BEFORE you do your one-click upgrade:

Make a backup of all your site data
Upgrade of all your plugins
Visit plugin and theme author websites
Disable all plugins
Ask yourself if you need to upgrade now

I also recommend waiting a week or so to view feedback before upgrading.

I know several of you haven’t upgraded WordPress to 2.8 yet. How long do you plan on waiting until you upgrade your WordPress installation? Please include which version of WordPress you are currently using with your comment!

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Google Wants You To Upgrade Your WordPress Installation

Kyle Eslick — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 08:00:02 +0000

Some of our long time readers may remember last April when we wrote a post about Technorati wanting you to upgrade your WordPress installation. In that post, we explained that Technorati will no longer be indexing your site if you have an old installation of WordPress running on your blog. This is of course due to the major security vulnerabilities on some old WordPress installations. Unfortunately this announcement didn’t get much attention, as Technorati has failed to grow with the blogging community and has basically become irrelevant over the past year.

With that said, for those of you on old WordPress installations, maybe this will be a bigger incentive to upgrade? According to Quick Online Tips, it looks like Google has begun warning users of WordPress 2.1.1 via their Google Webmaster Tools of the security vulnerability of this version. If this is successful, Google will then expand to notifying webmasters of other vulnerable WordPress installations, as well as other blogging platforms. Note: This does not affect WordPress.com users, as your sites are automatically upgraded for you.

Why is this important? I believe that it is conceivable that eventually Google could not index your sites that are using a version of WordPress that are considered unsafe. This is because these blogs are targeted by hackers and inappropriate content or malicious code is often placed on these sites. Google does not want these types of sites in their index.

I know there are a few of you out there that don’t necessarily upgrade your WordPress installations. Will WordPress 2.7′s easy upgrade process help you to upgrade your installations regularly?

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The Importance of Upgrading Your WordPress Installation

Kyle Eslick — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 08:00:29 +0000

If you follow the underground world of domain names, you’ve probably noticed that this past week, a lot of coverage has been focusing on hackers who managed to take over a few domains owned by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is the company who regulates the world’s domain names. What you may not have heard about, however, is that in what appears to be an unrelated incident, ICANN also had their WordPress blog hacked about the same time.

In another unrelated incident, ICANN’s official blog was attacked using a recent exploit in the blogging software WordPress. This attack is believed to have been automated and not done with any motivation regarding ICANN itself. The effects were limited to the blog being taken offline for a short while while updates and repairs took place.

ICANN getting their blog hacked was a direct result of failing to upgrade their WordPress installation. Now obviously ICANN has a fairly high profile blog, but this appeared to be a random attack and can truly happen to anyone.

I’ve actually written in the past a few times about the importance of always upgrading your WordPress installation, but what most of you probably don’t know is that I preach this out of personal experience. About a year and a half ago my original WordPress blog was hacked simply because I hadn’t upgraded my WordPress installation. WordPress had released a fix and I didn’t upgrade right away.

I was actually very fortunate that the person who gained access to my site seemed to have good intentions, as he simply warned me to upgrade my WordPress installation. Unfortunately, though, it is something I will never forget. Not only do you feel personally violated when this happens, but I was dumb and used similar passwords for many of my other accounts. Someone with bad intentions could have easily guessed my similar password I used for my email account, then had access to all my accounts and other personal information.

Since that time, I have always upgraded my websites/blogs that use WordPress the day the upgrade is available, and I have always been outspoken to others about upgrading their WordPress installations. The WordPress team has really been doing a great job of lately of testing their software, so we aren’t usually seeing more than 3-4 upgrades within each WordPress branch (2.3.x, 2.5.x, etc.). For those new to WordPress, I remember it often going up to 7 or sometimes more in the WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0 days.

In case you weren’t aware, you have a number of options when upgrading your WordPress installation. Obviously there is the manual upgrade, which many people dread. Other upgrade options include upgrading via Fantastico, or upgrading using a WordPress plugin such as WordPress Automatic Upgrade.

Would you say that you usually upgrade your WordPress installation right away?

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