By : Jeff Rose | In : Wordpress
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With all of the talk regarding security and upgrading WordPress lately, I thought I’d weigh in on an important topic and try to clarify something.
I was listening to a PodCast from WPTavern with Lorelle VanFossen, a well known blog evangelist and WordPress guru, when they made a very interesting point. I may have my attribution here wrong, so forgive me.
Basically, they made a distinction (an important one) between an UPDATE and an UPGRADE. Now, in the end this is more of a semantic distinction and may vary from project to project. Here’s what they basically said:
“An update is a smaller patch or fix, without any major functional changes. An upgrade is a more feature rich or specific deployment.”
What does this mean for you? In general, when WordPress updated from 2.8.3 to 2.8.4, they were fixing a few smaller bugs and generally NOT changing any functionality, which means this type of update shouldn’t break your blog, theme or plugin.
When WordPress releases a major upgrade (2.7 to 2.8, or 2.8.x to 2.9), this also shouldn’t break themes or plugins if the developer has been watching the update notices from the WordPress dev team, but it does carry a risk with it. That’s not to say that a major upgrade should be avoided, just that the blog owner, or whoever is responsible for updates, needs to be more cautious.
How can you prevent WordPress upgrades breaking your site?
- Be sure you’re up-to-date with smaller upgrades. Going from 2.7 to 2.9 is almost sure to break something. But going from 2.8.4 to 2.9 will carry a smaller risk with it
- Check for updates to your theme. Yep, themes update too and some of the heavily customized ones may break when WordPress issues a major upgrade
- Check for updates to your plugins. We know plugins update because we see the nag-number regularly. Before you upgrade WordPress, make sure any critical plugins are compatible with the newest version, or at least that you are running the latest version.
- Make a backup of your entire site and database, just seconds before you start the upgrade. Doing so ensures that you can roll-back to the exact moment before things when badly. You are backing up at least weekly anyway, right?
- Run a test or development duplicate of your blog. It doesn’t have to have all the content, but it should have some (restore a recent backup) and it should definitely be running the exact same theme and plugins as your current public blog. This allows you to test out any minor updates to plugins and themes, as well as major upgrades to WordPress core, without affecting your regular site. You may be tempted to run this against your main blog’s database. Don’t! Use a 2nd database. This doesn’t even have to be a public site. A site running locally on a WAMP, MAMP or LAMP install is perfect for this.
Keeping WordPress current and running well doesn’t need to be a hassle. A few simple steps will keep your blog or website safe and secure with a minimum of timely maintenance.
