WordPress 2.5-Step-by-Step upgrade Guide for Beginners

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As many of you would know that, WordPress 2.5 RC 2 beta is released. I am not sure how many of you have upgraded. This post is not for the people who have already upgraded and have been playing around with this baby for sometime. So if you happen to be one of them, you can stop reading at your own discretion. However, the purpose of this post is to get the newbies and the non-geeks to upgrade to the new release.

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.