WordPress 2.1 Upgrade Made Easy

Posted on September 21, 2007
Filed Under WordPress Admin |

The greatness of WordPress is that there are many talented programmers to keep this blogware updated to implement new technologies and extend new features. To take advantage of this, keep your WordPress up-to-date too. We just upgraded 2 of our Wordpress websites (www.ITCareerSuccess.com and www.IT-Job-Interview.com) to 2.1.2. It’s a really easy process. Here’s what we did:

Download the zip file “wordpress-2.1.2.zip” from http://wordpress.org/download/ and unzip it into a folder. Then following the instruction on
http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress and you’ll be all right.

Just be careful about what folders and files to replace and what you need to keep. Basically, you need to keep the following files and folders untouched, and replace all others with the new version.

Don’t delete/replace the following files and folders:
.htaccess
wp-config.php
/wp-content/
/wp-images/ (if you have it)
/wp-includes/languages/ (if it is not empty)

After updating all necessary files and folders on the web host server, run \wp-admin\upgrade.php from the browser to finish the upgrade process.

We did have a small issue with one of my websites after upgrade: The Visual tab for WYSIWYG didn’t show in the editor page. I did a search for “WordPress WYSIWYG Visual Editor not working ornNot appearing” and got the solution. What happened was, I turned off the visual editor with WYSIWYG in the previous version, 2.0.

In Wordpress 2.0, there are 2 places to control the editor mode, - Visual or HTML code:

  1. Options -> Writing -> Formatting -> Checkbox for “Users should use the visual rich editor by default”
  2. Users -> Your Profile -> Personal Options -> Checkbox for “Use the visual editor when writing”

In Wordpress 2.1, the first place is gone. Since my website had unchecked “”Use the visual editor when writing” in previous version. The Visual edit could not be available after upgrading to 2.1. To fix it, I just needed to go to Users -> Your Profile -> Personal Options and check it.

The tab switch between Visual and Code edit mode is very convenient. However, the spell check does not work. I did some research but didn’t get a good solution. Since I use WindowsLiveWrite to write and post my stuff most of the time, and WindowsLiveWriter comes with a good spell check, I can go without this function on Wordpress.

It is said there are many benefits with the new version, such as faster database access, auto save, better XML import/export, more AJAX features, and a lot more. To me these benefits are not that obvious, but when the new version comes out, you need to upgrade soon or later.

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