Zero Click WordPress 2.8.1 Upgrade at the Power Blog Service
Here at the Power Blog Service we manage WordPress Upgrades for our clients so they never need to worry about the hassle of manual or automatic upgrades.
Automatic upgrades do work for most of the people, most of the time, so they are a great step forward. However, depending on your host, your theme, your plugins and your customizations, you can end up with no blog! It is typically not gone, it just won’t display properly or at all. Don’t worry it is recoverable. But that means some stress and between 30 minutes and a few hours (or even days) to put everything back in order.
Automatic WordPress Upgrade Failure means Time Lost on a Manual Restore and Manual Upgrade
Here are some examples on typical problems with automatic upgrades from the WordPress forums
- File copy problems with smiley images – reverted to manual installation
- Custom code problems – rollback and revert to manual installation
- Hosting permission issue? – used manual installation instead
- Transient problems with update of comments file – reverted to manual installation
- A blank blog page due to Incompatible plugin problem – over a day wasted with downgrades and upgrades
Power Blog Service Tests the New Release So You Don’t Have To
At the Power Blog Service our goal is to have zero downtime for our clients’ blogs.
We do not use the WordPress automatic upgrade simply because we cannot be sure it will always work, and, if it does fail, the blog will suffer some period of downtime.
Therefore this is how we went about the WordPress upgrade: firstly, we did a manual installation of WordPress 2.8.1 to a test area and checked its operation against a blog with the full set of our recommended plugins. After some testing we discovered that we had some issues with the Thesis 1.5 (the sidebar appeared at the bottom of the page instead of the side) so we upgraded to Thesis 1.5.1. This resolved the problem. Once all the tests had been completed successfully we were ready to upgrade all our clients’ blogs.
Instantaneous WordPress Upgrade With No Downtime
We scheduled the upgrade for 07:00 GMT which is out of business hours for all our customers. For each blog we backed up the database, then switched the blog from WordPress 2.8 to WordPress 2.8.1 and then visited upgrade.php. The switch and upgrade took about 5 seconds per blog so the process is a rapid and painless one. From our clients’ standpoint the upgrade is pretty much instantaneous and there is no hassle and no downtime.
What is better than a One Click WordPress Upgrade?
Our clients like waking up in the morning to an email informing them that their WordPress blog has been updated successfully and that any relevant theme and plugin updates have taken place too.
Like us, they think a zero click WordPress upgrade is better than a one click upgrade, especially when it’s more reliable.