Upgrade to Wordpress 2.6 complete.

Of course when you log into the dashboard for your Wordpress installation it will scream at you to update if you are not already at the newest version. After looking at that message for a few weeks, I thought it was time.

The easiest way to upgrade your installation is to follow their installation/upgrade instructions. They are very simple and easy to follow. I however went one step further and read through their comprehensive upgrade instructions. I recommend these for anyone who has installed a plugin or theme that wasn’t part of the original installation. I am pretty sure that means most of us running Wordpress to host our own blog.

One of the most important steps that they talk about is to backup. This is truly a must! I recommend before starting your upgrade that you install a plugin called Backup Wordpress. Most of the Wordpress backup plugins that exist are designed to do database backups and not file backups. The upgrade of Wordpress will touch the database but only at the end of the procedure. This backup plugin will backup both the files and the database so you are safe.

Once you are sure you have a complete backup, then proceed with the upgrade. There is a lot of manual file manipulation so I recommend that you use an FTP client to connect to your server unless you have a very good web host interface.

Watch their steps carefully. The only one that I would recommend against is their suggestion to use a plugin called Maintenance Mode. This is a good plugin for when you are performing some tasks on the site, but in this case you are deleting so many supporting files the site will go down anyhow.

After the upgrade you will find some new features. Although they don’t seem huge, they are nice touches and typical of a sub-version release.

• Version/revision saves a copy of a post every time you edit it, allows you to view (not edit) each of those copies (revisions), Shows forward (in time) diffs between any two revisions.
• Display captions of images alongside them in posts and pages.
• Add paging of Themes in Design panel
• Word Count displayed when writing and editing posts and pages
• Press This bookmarklet
• Add sorting to gallery
• Export/import post excerpts
• Theme Previewer
• Check (assigned) Categories at top Category box in Write/Manage Post
• Show when a term is both a tag and a category
• Wider Profile fields
• TinyMCE 3.1
• Two categories can have sub-categories with the same name

Have fun blogging!