Upgrade WordPress Instantly… Almost.

One of the best (and worst) things about WordPress is that it’s constantly being tweaked and upgraded to squash bugs and add new features. It’s great because it’s features and abilities are always current. It’s bad because every time you turn around there is another upgrade you must perform. And when you are responsible for maintaining several WordPress installations, it can become very time consuming.

Thankfully, my host implements what it calls “One-Click Installs”. Basically this means that with one click, I can install or upgrade to the latest, most feature-rich and secure, version of WordPress. But what do you do if your host doesn’t offer such user friendly services?

You can either continue to manually upgrade your WordPress installs or give the InstantUpgrade plugin a try.

How does it work?

The InstantUpgrade plugin performs all of the necessary steps you would normally do by hand, automatically. In their words:

The InstantUpgrade plugin downloads the latest WordPress version from the WordPress server and unpacks it at your server. In the next step, it deletes all of your old WordPress files (except wp-content/ and wp-config.php, language packs are preserved, too) and puts the new files into your WordPress directory. At last, it runs the upgrade script contained it the new WordPress version.

Installation and Usage

The installation of this plugin starts out pretty easy, just download, upload to your plugins directory and activate. From there, however it takes a bit more effort to get set up. After activating the plugin you will need to change the permissions (CHMOD) on a few directories so the plugin will have access to make the appropriate changes during the upgrade. More information on which directories need to be changed can be found in the plugins documentation.

Once you’ve installed the plugin and made all of the necessary configurations, just navigate to “Manage” > “InstantUpgrade” in your WordPress admin and hit “Upgrade my WordPress!” Also, one of the nice things about this plugin is that your not obligated to upgrade to the latest and greatest version. You can choose any version you wish.

I haven’t specifically tried this, but theoretically, I would assume you could also use this plugin downgrade a bit as well, if needed. At least as long as there weren’t any database changes involved.

Conclusion

It may take a bit more time and effort to get setup up than your usual WordPress plugin, but it will save lots of time in the long run. Of course you could just always upgrade to a host that has built in, one-click upgrades available.

Tags: Upgrading, wordpress plugin