The smart and wonderful Cairene MacDonald from Third Hand Works has invited me to be a special guest teleclass leader for her excellent Bite the Candy series of workshops this Thursday, June 10, on the subject of Backups and Upgrades Without Tears.
Side note: “Without tears” is pretty much my preferred way to do everything, except maybe attend weddings — there’s no avoiding a meltdown of empathetic joy in that case, so I just bring tissues.
Anyway, I’ve written about upgrades in detail here on the blog, and I thought I’d collect all the related links into a handy-dandy reference in honor of biting the candy.
How to upgrade practically anything
This is a 6-part series on upgrading, inspired by my experiences upgrading WordPress from version 2.6 to 2.8. It’s written mostly about software, but the theory and practical steps apply to hardware, website stuff, and everything in between. More or less.
- Part 1: Taking Stock (or: Meeting Your Fears Where They Are)
- Part 2: Laying the Foundation (or: Back Up Your Stuff)
- Part 3: Preparation (or: Getting Out Your Ingredients)
- Part 4: Documenting (or: Show Your Work)
- Part 5: Testing (or: Run That By Me Again)
- Part 6: Postmortem (or: Monday Morning Quarterbacking)
I also wrote posts (with step-by-step screenshots) on how to upgrade WordPress and how to upgrade a WordPress plugin. Since I wrote the latter post, WordPress has introduced the ability to bulk-upgrade plugins (meaning you can upgrade a bunch of them all at once, with a single click), which is an awesome time-saver and probably means I need to write another post illustrating that process.
The backup brigade
Did you happen to notice that I devoted a whole entry (Step 2) of the upgrade series to backing up? If you go read my post about upgrading WordPress, you’ll see that I mention backups there, too. And any sane upgrade guide will tell you the same thing: Back up before you upgrade.
This is why backups and upgrades are a package deal. You need your stuff backed up before you attempt an upgrade (honestly, you need your stuff backed up no matter what, but upgrading is a great excuse!).
Here are three posts about backups:
- Back up before you upgrade (yes, this is the same link as Step 2 in the list above, because backing up is just that important).
- Detailed instructions (with screenshots) for using the WP-DB Backup plugin to backup your WordPress database
- My first post urging regular backups contains a short list of suggestions for starting a backup habit.
I’m looking forward to biting some candy with Cairene on Thursday, and I hope you’ll consider joining us!
Related posts:
Posted by Wendy Cholbi, your friendly neighborhood swim-goggle-wearing technology-to-English translator
