I just finished upgrading this blog to the latest Wordpress release (2.9.1).

I usually do a little research just to see if anyone has any problems with their upgrades and while I certainly appreciate the automatic upgrade options for the Wordpress core and plugins I tend to be a little too paranoid to click the upgrade button.

I have before for very small plugins but I generally like being a bit more cautious because I have read about the odd person’s tale of woe… loosing a database or getting an internal server error message….etc.

My approach is usually what is reckomended.

1. Backup all your site’s files!
2. Backup your database!
3. I sometimes upload the wp-admin and wp-includes folders in temp spaces… and rename them when ready..
4. I disable all plugins
5. I check the config.php file to see if there are changes to make (very rarely does it need anything)
6. I then upload all root files (index.php etc..)
7. I rename the wp-includes and wp-admin folders..
8. Login to the admin…
9. Click to upgrade the DB as required
10. enable each plugin…. upgrade if required…

Voila!

I’ve rarely had a problem.

But I have made mistakes… and a few times I forgot one of the steps, like disabling the plugins. So in my debugging I found some helpful ressources, like this blog article on how to manually disable WordPress plugins using SQL. It may not be something that you want to try if you don’t have any experience in web development, SQL..etc.

The article is called “Quickly Disable or Enable All WordPress Plugins via the Database“

So why did I choose Wordpress?

Well, Wordpress is one of the most used blogging tools out there and since it’s been around for a while it’s also quite polished.

Many bloggers use Wordpress and there are tons of plugins that you can get to provide various functionality.

A few plugins I’ve decided to use:
Contact Form 7 – http://ideasilo.wordpress.com/2007/04/30/contact-form-7/
This plugin provides a contact form that allows people to send a message through the website to an email address.

WP-SpamFree – http://www.hybrid6.com/webgeek/plugins/wp-spamfree
This plugin provides some spam filtering for the blog comments.

You can also find many Wordpress plugins and Themes over at http://wordpress.org/extend/

Wordpress also has some great features that may come in handy when writting. In the editor there is a handy spell checker. The spell check is one that I will use quite often, it’s quite handy in finding nasty typos.

Another very handy feature is that Wordpress will automatically save draft copies while writing blog articles so if you happen to shutdown the browser a bit pre-maturely all may not be lost.

It’s also quite easy to change the website’s theme or layout at the click of a button… once you’ve uploaded the theme’s files of course.

So all in all I believe Wordpress is a very solid tool to work with. I’ll post about handy plugins, widgets and anything else that I find helps me in this process.