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“