WordPress Plugins - WordPress Automatic Upgrade

If there was a plugin out that that I would vote as a life-saver, this has to be one of them. The ingenuity of this plugin automates the otherwise tideous process of upgrading your WordPress installation.

Unless you had initially installed WordPress via Fantastico from your webhosting control panel, Upgrading WordPress can be a tricky affair if you hadn’t had your coffee for the day.

Sure, it is meant to be done in a few simple clicks of your mouse from your Fantastico panel. The downside is it does take longer for an available WordPress upgrade to be distributed through Fantastico. The longest I have experience was a 12 weeks delay. This basically meant that other self-hosted weblogs have already been upgraded to protect from bugs and security loopholes. Yet your weblog is still exposed to those known threats because you can upgrade until your hosting provider has distributed the new software on Fantastico. Well, if it makes you sleep better at night knowing that security breaches have been confirmed on your blog and that half the world knows about those breaches.. I guess there’s no problem then.

Self-hosted WordPress weblogs which had been originally self-installed can be upgraded after uploading the necessary files. Of course bloggers need to take care to upload the necessary files and not overwrite some critical ones. This really shouldn’t happen unless you are half asleep but doesn’t mean that it we won’t make a mistake.

The WordPress Automatic Upgrade automates that with a few mouse clicks. It’s pretty straight-forward and redundant to spell it’s functions out here. A recommendation will be to upgrade the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin first (if there is one available) before you upgrade your WordPress installation.