The long-awaited WordPress 3.1 was officially released as the new stable version of WP sometime last night. This new version of WordPress brings with it quite a few major changes. It is highly recommended that you backup your entire WordPress installation (your files and your database) before performing the upgrade, as I suspect there will be quite a few plugins that won’t work the way you would expect with this new version (especially if you are a WordPress multi-site user).
WordPress 3.1 will most likely be released in the next few weeks, and it brings with it a few major changes. If you’re a regular WordPress user, you might not immediately notice many of the updates; but if you are a WordPress Multi Site user, or you are a plugin developer, the changes will most likely seem somewhat revolutionary.
The major change for WordPress Multi Site is the isolation of the Network Administration area. The Super Admin menu is going away, and being replaced with an entirely new admin dashboard for Super Admin users. Developers that initially made their plugins compatible with WordPress MU or WordPress Multi Site will need to make some minor modifications in order to make their plugins compatible with WordPress 3.1.
The folks over at WordPress released a new minor version this evening, and are calling it a “mandatory security update”. From the looks of it, only a handful of “minor” (their word, not mine) security holes were patched in this version, so I’m not quite sure why it’s being tagged as mandatory.
Regardless, if you’re running WordPress anywhere, you should really login to your administrative area, back up your site and then perform the update (if you don’t have a nag message at the top of your dashboard, you can always go to the “Updates” section under the “Dashboard” menu).
As you are no doubt aware, a major update for the iPhone/iPod Touch operating system was released by Apple last week. The first day it was released, I downloaded the large update file (almost 300 megabytes) and attempted to install it overnight on my iPhone 3G. Unfortunately, when I woke up in the morning, I was confronted with an iTunes error indicating that the backup was not completed successfully.
Later that evening, I tried again. I started trying to update around 6 p.m. on Tuesday evening, and finally cancelled the process around 11 p.m., having made very little progress in the backup process.
I tried a few more times over the next few days, and kept experiencing a similar problem. At one point, Windows decided to restart itself in the middle of the backup process because Windows updates had been installed.
Finally, overnight last night, I modified my Windows power settings, making sure that my computer would not go to sleep for at least four hours (just in case that was the issue) and attempted the update one more time.
Recently, the WordPress team has been pushing out new releases rather quickly, making it advisable to upgrade your installation fairly regularly. The WordPress wiki includes some pretty good instructions explaining how to backup your install and how to upgrade. However, with the EZ WordPress Backup plugin, you can backup and upgrade with even more ease.
Installing the EZ WordPress Backup plugin is just as simple as installing any other plugin. Simply go to your Plugins menu and click the “Add New” link. In the search box, type in “EZ Backup” and the EZ WordPress Backup plugin will be the only result that appears. Click the Install link and then activate the plugin.
For those of you that may not have noticed, yet, WordPress MU has updated to version 2.8.5. Recently, WordPress MU has been making great progress in following closely behind WordPress in its release schedule. If you are running WordPress MU on your site, please make sure to upgrade to the new version.
With WordPress MU, you can easily login to your administrative control panel and update all of your blogs with a few simple clicks of the mouse. Once you login, you’ll see a notification at the top of the screen informing you that WordPress MU 2.8.5.2 is available, along with a link to update your installation.
Once you have backed up your WPMU database and all of your WPMU files, you can simply click “Upgrade Automatically” button to quickly and easily update your WPMU installation.
