Many of you have probably noticed that the upgrade bar has appeared at the top of your WordPress blog notifying you to update to 2.7.1

I have written in the past about the imporance of keeping your code base at the highest level in Should You Update Your Version of WordPress. I want to expand about this and talk about the  automatic upgrade process.

Back It Up – How Many Times Do I have To Say It!

I feel like a broken record, recently all I have done is write about backup.  Back it up before you do any upgrade [link to 6 times]

Site Vault

I just thought I would spend a few minutes writing about a new utility I am using to do my blog backups.

The tool is Site Vault, and excellent little utilty which backs up your code base and database in one go.

You setup the utility to backup ftp and upload a small script to backup your database.  One click backup and one click restore – excellent.

It costs $19 for a full version, but comes with a 30 day trial, check it out, it comes highly recommended by me.

Site Vault Demo (p.s. I don’t do affiliate links)

Automatic Upgrade

Part of the new 2.7 fucntionality is an automatic upgrade.  Normally I am a bit jittery allowing systems to upgrade automatically, I am old school I guess and like to see exactly what is being changed, and have the power to roll it back easily.

But intrepid exploter that I am, I dedided to do it automatically so you dear readers can learn of my exciting voyage.

Press The Button Cross Fingers

I clicked on the button with my fingers crossed hoping that nothing would go wrong and to my extreme pleasure nothing did, the files were downloaded and applied to my code base with no fuss.

The automaic upgrade does exactly what it says on the tin, one click automatic upgrade.

My Experience

Upgrading is a very simple process now, very much like upgrading plugins, I was very very impressed by the whole process, it takes a lot of the administrative burden away from maintaining your blog.

I would like to see some sort of rollback process to take your blog back to the previous version, but I guess that may be in the future.

I will definetly be using the automatic upgrade from now on.  Did I mention to backup before you start?