WordPress Can Now Upgrade Itself!
Well it’s about freakin’ time! I’ve been using WordPress as a framework for writing blog entries here on my website since the I started posting some many months ago. And every time a new version was released, I would have to upgrade manually. This was nerve-racking because you had to be careful not to accidentally delete certain files from your server, or your whole blog would be wiped out (of course you’d also have to manually backup before doing this). Worse, the whole upgrading process would take about 15 minutes or longer (depending on connection) because even though Word press only consists of about 1.2 MB of data, it’s split up into hundreds of tiny files, which makes things SLOW over FTP.
But today (which is turning out to be a pretty great day for a lot of different reasons) I logged in to check on my comments and notice the following:
Oooo!! An update button! In the past, something like this would direct you to WordPress.com and have you download a zip, extract the few hundred files out, delete certain folders from your server, then upload the necessary files to replace the old ones, THEN go to a special web link on your server to complete/verify the upgrade. In a word, it SUCKED. To my delight, this is what I got after clicking the button:
Automatically? Huzzah!!
Now I know that to advanced web developers, this doesn’t come across as a big deal because if you had shell access to your server, you could just SSH into your server and run a couple of commands that would extract the download and fore-go the need to upload hundreds of tiny files. But that costs extra and when it comes to web hosting fees, I try to keep things on the cheap side.
So Cheers to the WordPress devs! You’ve made my life just a little easier.