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I hope someone can help me find out how to upgrade to wordpress 2.7 on a Hostgator account.

Here's my position.

I started a blog a few weeks ago and installed wordpress on Hostgator.
I didn't add any content yet. The only thing I did to the blog was to install wordpress and then choose a theme.
When I went back to start adding content, I found that there is a new upgrade to 2.7.

Questions--


Do I click on the upgrade 2.7 button from my wp admin page in wordpress and follow the 5 min quick installation directions, or do I simply upgrade in Cpanel by clicking on the wordpress button on the left hand side and go through the install as I did when I first installed wordpress to my domain name?

I don't want to mess anything up. I thought I'd better ask someone who knows before trying anything.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Rozina

If you have the Automatic Upgrade plugin installed, it is a simple matter of following instructions( in Admin, go to Manage ,click it a drop-down menu will open, find Automatic Upgrade, click it and follow the steps outlined. If not go to www.wordpress.org find the plugin, unzip it , upload it and activate it. Then follow the outlined steps.

Depending on which version of Wordpress that you have installed it might be wise to wait few weeks as while 2.7 isn't a security upgrade, It like all major revisions to Wordpress could cause problems for plugins, etc so the wait time is for developers to get up to speed. Translation: just because Wordpress wants you to upgrade doesn't mean you have too . Never more true then when it isn't a Security problem.

Fantastico is somewhat slow in having the latest Wordpress version. So you might not be able to upgrade that way even if you wanted too.

Hope this helps

I've been talking with several other people that have recently upgraded to WP v2.7 and it broke many of their installed plugins that worked fine earlier.

Personally, I'm at v2.5.1 and I'm NOT planning to upgrade WP unless there are serious security fixes or has new features I want to use. Unless you need the new version's "new additions", I'd consider staying with what is working for you now.

IF you have a version before v2.5.1 you really should upgrade, though as those older version had some serious security issues.

My 3 centz anyway ...

I agree with using the Automatic Plugin instead of manually upgrading or using Fantastico.

I like using Fantastico for the initial installation, but I've had some serious problems in the past with using it to upgrade blogs.

Also agree about major version upgrades. I'll wait for at least 2.7.1 or 2.7.2, depending upon how many problems other bloggers have with them.

Act on your dream!

JD

The upside of WordPress is it's free, full featured, fully supported with ongoing development and oodles of plugins to add even more functions and features. The downside is it's computer software that unfortunately needs upgrading and updating at some point: sometimes for feature changes, other times for security risks. Most upgrades on WordPress have a little of both.

WP 2.7 is a big change from 2.5, but it's worth it and is going to be necessary at some point. Eventually older versions just aren't going to function with even the simplest of plugins, and you could be leaving your system open to a security risk with older versions.

I like the wp-automatic upgrade plugin. It truly does work very well. It does all the steps necessary for you to upgrade all from within the wp-admin area. I plan to continue to use this plugin, even though 2.7 has a built-in upgrade feature, because it's built-in feature isn't nearly as good as the plugin. Check out my blog for my video tutorial on the wp-automatic upgrade plugin, with a link, if you're interested.

Great informative post Traci. I too use and love the Automatic Upgrade plugin and don't quite understand why Word Press has chosen to add a crippled version of it(must be jealous) and also groove on the automatic upgrades of plug-ins. Not so groovy is the install a plug-in from a zip file which at least in my case triggers a Fatal Error every time I'm silly enough to try it again. So far the Fatal Errors haven't affected the Blog.

Hello! I am have trouble changing the theme on wordpress.org. Can anyone help? I have the 2.7 from Host Gator. I'm confused.

Thanks

So if I understand you - you have your own hosting at hostgator and you have a blog installed and you don't like the standard theme?



google for one you like and download it to a folder - call it wp themes or suchlike.

Unzip it

FTP it to the themes folder in your hosting account

login to your blog

activate it

DONE.

Did any of that lose you?



Alex

Fran - I suggest you first download and install the . What this does is it allows you to easily install plugins AND themes all with one click from within your wp-admin area. No need to unzip them first, it does all that for you and automatically installs them in the right spot too. Very handy.

So you will need to unzip the above plugin (the last one you should have to do!) and install that folder in the plugins folder {wp-content/plugins}

Then after the above is installed, you will now see a link under the Appearance tab in your wp-admin area that says 'Install a Theme'; click that - then you can browse your C: drive and find the zip file (no need to unzip it) and upload it from your computer and WordPress will unzip it, and put it right where it needs to go.

Then click Appearance again, and it should show that new theme listed there, just click the name of the theme and it should pop up a preview window so you can see what your site will look like with that theme, if you like it - click 'Activate [theme name]' in the upper right corner. If you don't want that one, just click the 'X' in the upper left corner to close it.

Very neat Traci -one I hadn't come across. Installing it got me into something I had not seen outside of Lynn's webinars -Internal Server Error.

Ahem!

I just hit the back button and went on regardless. I guess if you can't do FTP this is a short cut.

No unzipping either

Not too happy about the error tho'

Alex