Should you upgrade your Wordpress Blog?
There is a security warning concerning those who have upgraded their Wordpress blog to v2.1.1. Quickly download the latest version v2.1.2 to patch the security exploit present in v2.1.1.
With this, I would like to share with you some of my experiences when it comes to upgrading any software, platform or operating system. Usually as a rule of thumb, I would not upgrade any software unless there is a major version change. E.g. v1.x to v2.x.
But do upgrade immediately if there are security concerns being pointed out even if it is just a minor version upgrade!
Using Wordpress as an example, I have compiled a checklist for you when you have to do some upgrading. It will be short and will cover only the important things to take note before upgrading.
Here we go, the checklist is as follow:
1) Backup all your data in your mySQL database. The database is the place where all your posts and related content are stored.
2) Make sure all plugins are compatible with the new platform. You won’t want to lose any functionality of your blog after upgrading. Unless you don’t mind losing a redundant function.
3) Save your edited themes. Make sure your current theme works with the new Wordpress engine.
If nothing goes wrong, congratulate yourself for a job well done. Otherwise, be thankful that you have backup everything. Restoring everything will get you back to where you started. This is definitely better than losing all your posts and having no way to retrieve anything back. Definitely, losing your blog’s content will be very painful as all your hard work will be washed down the drain and all your posts indexed on Google will return a “page not found” error. So don’t do anything that is unnecessary to your business.
Always remember that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Concentrate on your business as you may not even use the new feature in your business. Don’t upgrade that often unless there is a security exploit in the engine or there is a significant benefit brought by an upgrade that will improve your business model.
Finally if you are not using at least wordpress v2.0.9, please upgrade immediately to prevent someone from hacking your blog.
Tags: Wordpress, security warning, upgrading tips
March 4th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
that’s not very nice advice. While I can understand in terms of holding back on major upgrades, as it often break many things, the small updates are actually pretty crucial, especially in terms of security.
Already many security holes have been patched from 2.0.4 to 2.0.9. In fact, Andrew wee points out that many prominent internet marketers were hacked because they were on 2.0.5
staying on 2.0.4 is a major risk, especially not to upgrade to 2.0.9. upgrading to 2.1.2 would take much more considerations though.
March 4th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
TedFox,
Thanks for pointing out the security flaws that the other versions are having. Do update to the latest version if you are still using the older versions.
Lester