Wordpress has completely revolutionized the way I do web development lately. With the flexibility of it’s code and the incredible integration of plug-ins, I’m finding their is very little you can’t do with WordPress, as long as your willing to experiment and look around. So it’s probably no surprise that my life has become a monthly ritual of updating Wordpress sites due to upgrades or security patches. As it stands today I am managing 9 WordPress blogs. Either in my professional life or in my private professional life. So this takes a considerable amount of time since they aren’t all located on the same server or running from the same Database. I’d be being polite if I said I loathe the day a WordPress update came out.

So I decided to see if some loving sole in the open source community had felt my pain long enough to go out and do something about it, specifically write a nice plug-in that would update my web sites without all the rig -a- ma-roll I would usually go through to update them. and to be really honest their were some sites I simply updated without doing a backup, deciding that if God was willing to let me loose http://jim.edwardsdesign.org the I was going to have to be ok with it too (I call this laziness by the Holy Spirit).

As luck would have it I found such a tool! Wordpress Automatic Upgrade by Keith Dsouza at techie-buzz.com. So being the kind soul that I am I figured I’d give it a test run for you all so that you know you can trust this handy piece of plug-in. I’m pleased to announce that it ran like a dream! Installation is much like the beauty of all WordPress plug-ins, simply unzip, upload, and turn on. After that it’s a simple click interface to update your WordPress site and back it up incase the whole blows up in your face.

What really impressed me with this little bundle was the little things. The fact that it automatically backed up my essential data and database, it turned off my plug-ins and turned them on again after the update was complete, and reported back to me the success and failures (not that I had any) at the end of the process.

I really have nothing to say but praises for this plug-in. I’ll admit I went into this thinking I was going to have major problems, I even planned on writing a post stating how much this plug-in screwed me over… I even had a nice title picked out “Automatic blowup of Wordpress.” But on the contrary I ended up using it on all 9 WordPress sites I have. I’ve never been happier with a plug-in, this one has truly saved me HOURS!

The following are some instructions for how I ran installed and ran Automatic Upgrade on my sites. Mind you it’s not difficult, but I wanted to demonstrate for all you skeptics out their.

1. Download wordpress-automatic-upgrade.zip from

2. Unzip and upload the new folder to your wp-content/plugins folder

3. In your WordPress manager navigate to “Plug-ins” and activate the Wordpress-automatic-upgrade plug-in.

4. Navigate to Manage > Automatic Upgrade

(from here you can either manually run it by clicking “click here” or set it to automatic by clicking “automated version” For this first attempt I tried the “safe?” approach by manually running the update. However, the remaining 8 WordPress sites I maintain went through the automated version….ran great)

5. Next it asks you to download the backup it just created, I’ve clicked the download link and saved my back up, and clicked next.

6. Table Backups - next it allows you to select additional tables that you’d like backed during this process… We’ll be doing all of them cause I really like my data! Then click Start DB backup.

7. Success on the DB backup, and I download the backup to my local machine as before.

8. Latest Version - here it asks if I’d rather have it go get the update or upload the latest version from my machine. However upon closer examination I see this second option is not available… guess I’ll go with the first. IMPORTANT: This can take some time…duh…don’t mess with it, let the mojo work it’s magic.

9. Ok that didn’t take as long as I feared….next it looks like WAU automatically puts your site in maintenance mode.. and deactivates all my plug-ins ….remember kids… safety first! BTW, it remembers which were active and which weren’t so it will put them all back like you like….

10. Now for the upgrade! Click obvious button….be patient.

11. So far so good, click the “click here to complete final step” to make any changes to the DB… (this will open in a separate window) so you can come back and reactivate your plug-ins. The real benefit here, is after the DB upgrade it takes you back to your homepage…so if a problem has happened, your going to know about it right now!

12. That being done, simply close the new window that was created, and click next to reactivate your plug-ins.

13. All went well except I did receive a message that two of my plug-ins couldn’t be activated. My Mobile Admin and Flicker plugins….But that’s good news, since we now know that it will tell you if their is a problem with a plug-in and it won’t give you this false sense of security that all went well.

14. Final step, gives you some output and tells you exactly how the process went…. including the error message on my plug-ins just in case you forgot to write it down, cause you were busy building this tutorial….

But wait don’t leave that page yet, cause this is a great time to cleanup that upgrade folder and get ride of your backups that you won’t be needing anymore, specially sense you downloaded them …right?

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