Step 1: Backing up your old wordpress

If you are wondering that the step one is download the latest beta release and to upload it, then I am afraid my friends you’d making one of the biggest mistake called as ignorance. Unless, you feel ignorance is a bliss to you, you can do it (upload). But if you don’t want to screw up, then for every upgrade, the first step is backup my dear friends. Backing up your wordpress is a great idea before any upgrade, whether it is for a stable release or it is for a beta release. You can do it pretty easily by looking for the steps to backup on Google, or you can use my favorite backup plugin WP-DBManager. Follow the installation guide.

Once you have backed up your wordpress, you can move to the next step.

Step 2: Installing the latest wordpress (wordpress 2.5 RC 2)

The next step in the process is to download the beta release. Once you have downloaded the zip/tar.gz file, extract it and save it on some location of your hard disk. What you have to do next is to just upload the content of the wordpress folder to your website host using FTP. During upload your FTP client will prompt you that the files already exist. It’s safe to say overwrite all. Safe because, your old files and folders will stay intact and only the native (old) wordpress files will be over written. Patience is the virtue at this point as it might take sometime to upload the new files using FTP client.

Step 3: Updating the database tables to meet the requirements of wordpress 2.5

Once you have successfully uploaded all the files, the next step is to get indulged. Log into your admin area and the first thing that you see is not the page that asks for user name and password. The first page asks you to update the database.

It is self explanatory, so just hit the link update database. After the database is successfully updated, you’ll see a page that has a link which says continue. Just hit continue. You’ll redirected to the admin login page. Use your login and you are in.

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.5 RC2. I think they have hired some user interface scientist (as my friend would call me. The 2.5 build looks amazing and not as cluttered as the 2.3.3. I am not sure why the update version was not named 2.4.

It has some cool new features. I am trying to collate all of it along with a snapshot of all the admin pages to make a tutorial for how to upgrade and off all what are the key features to the new build. I must caution you that if you are planning to upgrade, make sure you take the back-up of your blog on the regular basis and only upgrade at your own risk. With beta comes the curiosity of newness and pleasure to be the very few to taste the flavor of it. But with Beta releases, the risk of screwing up is also there.

I’ll post a detailed post in sometime. Until then keep your fingers crossed or just upgrade .

Well, I thought that I’ll write an update post on Odiogo. But I did not know that it’ll be so soon. As an update the odiogo plugin conflicts with a very important plugin (ajaxed wordpress). As a result, I’ve taken off the plugin and now you cannot see it anymore on my blog. However, you can use it as mentioned in the previous post. I’d soon be analyzing the code to check where the conflict is and try to make it work.

Sweet, isn’t it. Don’t believe me. Hit the listen button on top of this post (or any other post) and this blog would start reading the respective post. Let me tell you how I did this. First, got to Odiogo and register your site/blog with it. You’ll get an instruction to install the plugin and also instruction of how to make your feeds pod cast compatible. Let me know what you feel. I haven’t seen any major performance deterioration, so I guess I am going to keep it. If I find something that makes it not great for my blog, I’ll take it off and will write a post on the same.

I am not sure if there are other services like this. I am going to explore. But if you want to help me stay lazy, post a comment mentioning similar service.