Automaitic WordPress and plugin updates

First of all, let’s just make sure we’re talking about the same thing.  Since version 2.7, WordPress received one of the most useful features ever: automatic update. What this means is that every time a new version of WordPress is released, you now get a “click here to upgrade” option in your admin dashboard. When you click the link, it should ask for a confirmation and then proceed with automatic downloading and upgrading of your blog. But because of misconfigurations, this feature isn’t always working, and then you end up with a configuration dialog suggesting that you provide FTP credentials for accessing your server.

Possible reasons for automatic WordPress upgrade not working

There’s only a few reasons why WordPress or plugins upgrade feature will not work.

1. You’ve upgraded from older versions of WordPress

… and therefore don’t have the right configuration setting in your wp-config.php. Just add this to it:

define(‘FS_METHOD’,'direct’);2

2. Your blog is stored in a directory which webserver can’t update.

Quite often this is a result of someone (host administrator) installing you a new blog, but mistakenly leaving all the files owned by their own user or root (superuser). Since webserver software is running as something else (webservd in Linux distributions, or sometimes even user nobody), the software can read blog files but can’t overwrite them. Obviously, overwriting files is kind of critical for any upgrade process, so this scenario will result in automatic upgrades failure.

How would you fix this issue? Easy! If you have command line access to your hosting server, become root and change ownership of your blog’s files.

Assuming that your webserver runs as webservd user, and that your blog is in the /var/www/myblog.com directory, here’s a command line that will do the trick:

# chown -R webservd:webservd /var/www/myblog.com

3. Some files in your blog’s directory are read-only

This means that even if files belong to the user that your webserver is running as, there is still a chance that some files won’t be possible to overwrite because they have the read-only attribute (or read-only permission).

Fixing this from a command line isn’t hard at all. Assuming the same /var/www/myblog.com location, here’s what you should do:

# chmod -R ug+w /var/www/myblog.com

That’s it, I hope you liked this tutorial. Do ask questions in comments so that I can expand this article and make it most useful to all the future visitors!

DigWP.com blog has a great collection of links in a single post with some very good ideas: Admin Bar Tricks.

My personal favorites are: move admin bar to the bottom of screen and disabling admin bar for non-admins.

WordPress 2.8.1. highlights

Here are some of the features I really like in 2.8.1, please be sure to read the official WordPress 2.8.1 announcement to see more changes:

• Stability: reduced memory usage footprint for the dashboard – should help all the blogs running on modest servers and with strict php memory usage quotas
• Stability: automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade
• Stability: disabled code highlighting due to browser incompatibilities
• Security: extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks
• Security: stricter menu security

Don’t know about you, but I’m going to be upgrading all my blogs in the next 30min.

See also:

• WordPress – official website

WordPress

Gone are the days of manually clipping the WordPress logo from the official website! Last week I’ve discovered a wonderful page with all the official WordPress logos and buttons offered in PDF (with vector graphics) and PNG versions of everything.

There’s a set of WordPress wallpapers and a neat table with current colors used by WordPress engine.

Like WordPress? Find out more:

• Upgrade to WordPress 2.6.2
• WordPress 2.5 release
• Download WordPress

Looks like WordPress 2.6.2 with a few fixes is out, so I’ve just upgraded all my blogs to this new milestone.

For all the details, read the official WordPress 2.6.2 announcement or glance through the list of bugs fixed in 2.6.2 release.

See also:

• WordPress download page

There is an excellent highlight of all the main features on the WordPress blog: WordPress 2.5 Brecker.

New WordPress 2.5 features

The things I’m really looking forward to try are the following:

- new dashboard – apart from cleaner look and improved usability, it also supports widgets for expanded functionality

- multi-file upload – apparently with a progress bar!

- fully integrated tag management – adding/renaming/removing any tags is a native functionality with this release, so no additional plugins are needed

- using newer version of TinyMCE (that’s the fancy editor with plenty of useful toolbars you see when creating a page or a post) promises fixes to many complex HTML issues (working with lists and paragraphs has traditionally been painful for me), and there’s a no-distractions mode I really look forward to – minimum of interface controls so that you can fully concentrate on the content

There are many more improvements like automatic plugin upgrades and built-in image gallery functionality, which many of you will find useful as well, but I’ve yet to look into them.

All in all, I think it’s the most exciting upgrade, WordPress team once again did a great job.

Wait no longer: download WordPress 2.5 and get busy with your upgrades!

More links on WordPress 2.5

• Official announcement post for WP 2.5
• Getting ready for WordPress 2.5
• New interface in WordPress 2.5: a screencast
• WordPress Upgrading Guide

Finally, the new release of WordPress is here. WordPress 2.3, codenamed “Dexter”, brings many long-awaited features and fixes 350+ issues found in previous versions.

Most interesting features in WordPress 2.3

• Tags - now with native support. Strangely enough, you’ll need to download separate plugins to manage the tags.
• Canonical URLs – will allow you to change slugs of any post and have WordPress automatically redirect old slug URL to the new URL of your post. Brilliant idea, great for SEO! Mark Jaquith has a great post explaining how it all works: Canonical URLs in WordPress 2.3
• Advanced editing options in WYSIWYG editor for posts and pages are finally accessible via a special button. The trusty Shift+Alt+V combination for doing the same still works, of course.
• Update notification functionality will let you know when there’s a new version of the WordPress engine or any of the plugins you use. Must save us all tons of time we usually spend tracking the updates, downloading new versions and troubleshooting the upgrades of all the plugins.

If you want to learn more, there’s a traditional 10 Things You Need To Know About WordPress 2.3 review posted at Technosailor. As always, a highly recommended post!

Before you rush it to download the latest WordPress and get your upgrade started, please be sure to verify all your plugins are up to date and will be supported in the 2.3 release. I’ve done this for all the plugins on Perfect Blogger, and so my upgrade happened in a matter of seconds and without a single problem.

If you think you need help upgrading your WordPress – feel free to contact me and we’ll see what can be done.

Now, instead of carefully clicking through the list of spam, I simply glance through it to mark the non-spam messages off, and then forget about the rest. Akismet takes care of it and makes sure that my spam comments page is never too crowded.

To activate this option, first go to the Plugins section of your WordPress admin panel…

… and then click Akismet Configuration:

After ticking the option on and clicking the button, you’ll have this great feature enabled and your future peace of mind guaranteed. Enjoy!

Update 15/03/2008: – I’ve just noticed how someone liked this post enough to stumble it, so I have made a quick update to the post with some more steps of my new blog routine. Also, please check out the WordPress Plugins Magic website for a ready-made collection of plugins for download.

Here is what I do, feel free to ask questions in comments:

WordPress Setup

• Enable Akismet plugin, you’ll need a WordPress API for this
• Make all the files under wp-content/themes writable for your webserver – this will allow you to edit themes from WordPress control panel
• Create a .htaccess file in the top level directory of your WordPress install, and make it writable for your webserver to allow permalinks config from WordPress control panel

Basic SEO

• Enable permalinks, chose the permalink structure wisely – if you’re aiming for a timeless content, don’t use date tags.
• Download and activate the SEO Title Tag plugin. Change the options to use category names and blog name in relevant titles if you like.
• Download and activate the Google Sitemap Generator plugin. Submit your newly generated sitemap through the Google Webmaster Tools page.

Improve experience for your visitors

• Download and activate the Smart Archives plugin , you will probably need to create a separate page for it and put the appropriate tag for it to show the archives.
• Register a FeedBurner feed, install and point to it the FeedSmith plugin. Enable the SmartFeed option in FeedBurner‘s Optimize section for your new feed.

Open ways for interaction

• Set up a comment form (cForms for me – the best forms plugin ever!) – again, you’ll probably want to create a separate page for this.
• Download and activate the Sociable plugin (check out my tutorial on configuring it: Must Have Plugins: Sociable)

Hope this helps. My list is never static, I practically reinvent it every time I start a new project, so I’ll be updating this post from time to time.

Although I myself have upgraded all my blogs to WordPress 2.2.1 almost a week ago, I still can see it’s never too late to remind everyone to do the same.

As you probably now, WordPress 2.2.1 incorporating multiple security fixes and is therefore highly recommended.

You can download the full installation of WordPress from official website or, if you’re upgrading from WordPress 2.2, go ahead and use WordPress 2.2.1 instructions and archives by Mark Aquith.