Logging into the blog I learned there was a new version of WordPress out, the blogging platform that I use to run this site. So it’s time for a quick follow up to “How to Setup WordPress.” and learn how to upgrade to the latest version.
Compared to installing WordPress, this will be a piece of cake. You’ll see on your WordPress dashboard that there is an alert about the upgrade.
Click the link and it will take you to where you can download the updated software. Go ahead download the file.
Find where you saved the file on you computer use your favorite file compression utility (WinRAR in this case) to extract the WordPress folder from within it.
Next, open up your preferred FTP client. Connect to your web server.
We are using Filezilla as the FTP client in this example, your computer’s folders will be located on the left side, and your file server on the right. Find the WordPress folder you just extracted from within your computer’s window. Go in it and select all the files within the folder, EXCEPT any thing you may have modified since you originally installed WordPress. The only changes I’ve made are to my wp-config.php which is not included because I created it myself when I installed WordPress the first time. Same goes with my customized theme.
Copy everything selected over to the public_html in your web server window to the right. All you have to do is drag the selected files from one side to the folder on the other. On my setup Filezilla just happens to warn me about overwriting file. So I wont spend my whole day clicking the “OK” button, I check the “Always use this action” box, followed by the “Apply to current queue only”. This will go ahead and overwrite everything, but only until we are done copying WordPress over. It will go back to prompting when its finished.
Once the FTP client has completed copying everything over. Open up your web browser and point to http://yourblogsite.com/readme.html.
We used this file before during the install, and we’ll be using it again for the upgrade. If you scroll beyond the install instructions to the “Upgrading from any previous WordPress” you’ll see we’ve already done the first two steps.
Follow the third step and click the /wp-admin/upgrade.php link. In this particular case we get a page telling us “No Upgrade Required”.
This is normal for small upgrades when there are just minor patches and updates. If this were a major upgrade, you have a bit of a wait while the upgrade script made changes to the WordPress SQL database until it displayed “Upgrade Successful”. Either message is satisfactory and you are ready to continue blogging with the latest software version.
