So please do let me know what you think of my site so that I can improve it and also the new “My Polls and Your Votes” section.

You can vote below or use the “My Polls and Your Votes” section on the right menu. If you don’t see this one poll there then it is because I have created other polls and only the latest poll will appear, so click on the link that says “View All Polls & Votes”.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

I use the automatic upgrade feature from the admin section and for this upgrade it took about 3 minutes to upgrade using an average broadband connection.

As the upgrade uses FTP and as I believe it happens between your server and that where WordPress upgrade files are stored, there isn’t a lot of your own bandwidth used in the upgrade process, so even if you have a dial-up or other slower connection, the automatic upgrade should not take much longer than a few minutes.

It’s much easier and quicker than downloading the latest version and then unzipping it and then uploading all the files to your server.

A note for people using the MY CATEGORY ORDER plugin: As soon as the upgrade is done, your categories may not appear on your live blog because one file of WordPress needs to be patched (changed) for the plugin to work correctly.

So, before you do the upgrade keep the location of the following file ready in your FTP P client so that you can change the permissions on it for the plugin to be able to patch the new file.

/wordpress-directory/wp-includes/taxonomy.php

Once the upgrade has completed done CHMOD this to 666 so that it can be patched by the plugin and then go to your MY MY CATEGORY ORDER ordering page and this should automatically patch the f. Your category order should remain but click on “Click to order categories” at the bottom to simply re-sit your or order. That’s it – your categories should be as they were before the upgrade

It’s been a long time since I’ve upgraded systems that run this blog and I thought I’d better do it today.

I’ve also upgraded about 14 plug-ins which enhance the default features of WordPress, so please let me know if you find any odd behaviour of the site and it’s interactive features. Thank you.

I’ve been updating the links to the gallery so please let me know if any links don’t work.

Thank you.

After reading the WordPress support articles, compatibility lists and support forums, I thought the process would have taken a few hours considering the number of WordPress plug-ins that I use on this site’s blog.

But it took me about an hour (with a few cups of tea in between), and now I will tell you about my experience of the upgrade progress and how I think you should approach the upgrade.

Be Up To Date
1) Make sure you have the latest 2.6.5 release of WordPress installed and working with the latest plug-ins because this was my starting point.

Back-up
2) Now backup your database either using a custom or hosted installation of phpMyAdmin or one of the database backup plug-ins for WordPress.

3) Download a copy via FTP of all your blog files. Simply download the WordPress blog directory in one go.

Now you have all the information that you need to re-install your current working version of WordPress just in case anything odd happens with the upgrade process.

Before You Upgrade
4) Check that all your latest plug-ins are compatible with WordPress 2.7. You can see the plugin compatibility list and any issues as this link. If you find incompatibilities then simply follow the instructions for upgrading to WordPress 2.7 for each plugin.

5) Check that your theme is compatible with WordPress 2.7 by again checking the compatibility list at this link and following any suggestions for upgrading your theme to WordPress 2.7

6) You can check any compatibility issues with your hosting provider at this link.

Once you know what need to do before or after upgrading WordPress 2.7 and considering any compatibility issues  in points 4 to 6 above (if any at all), then you can start upgrading the process…

Upgrade
7) Download and copy all the WordPress 2.7 files over your existing installation on the server.

8) Go to your blog’s upgrade address in your browser (e.g. http://www.mysite.com/blog/wp-admin/upgrade.php)  and click the button to upgrade the WordPress database.

That’s it for upgrading the files and database to get to version 2.7 of WordPress.

9) Login to your admin and check your plug-ins again to see if any of them need an upgrade and if so upgrade them.

10) Following any instructions you noted from the compatibility lists for plug-ins, themes and host and that should be it.

My Upgrade Issues
Plug-ins WP-Email (emailing Posts to people) and WP-Print (printing Posts with custom page design) by Lester Chan had to be upgraded again after upgrading to WordPress 2.7. After installing these plug-ins I had to re-building the Permalinks in admin for the links to emailing and printing to work again.

The Manageable plugin by Aaron Harp (making it very easy to edit post details in the list of Posts view) had to be Deactivated and deleted as it is now built into WordPress 2.7

The custom logo used with the Register Plus plugin by Skullbit (which allows you to add extra and custom registration fields) had to be increased in size from 292 pixels wide to 300 pixels.

That’s it.

If you need any more information or support then please leave your feedback below.

My videos suddenly stopped appearing and only the link to the FLV (flash version of a video) file name appeared.

After upgrading to version 6.1.0, the video player worked again.

Thank you again.

I created a new category called Website Development for my blog Posts and I wanted to add all previous appropriate Posts to this category.

I knew it would have taken me hours to do this as I would have to go to each Post article in the admin section and tick the box for the “Website Development” category to add each Post to this category.

Even though the exercise was simply of clicking buttons, it could take about a minute or two to get to each appropriate article, for the page to load and to scroll down and click the appropriate category to include the Post into and then save the Post.

Aaron’s plugin simply allows you to use the list of Posts in WordPress to do all this for you using an Ajax type system which does not need a page reload.

I added Posts the new Website Development category in about 30 minutes using Aaron’s plugin.

Great work Aaron! and let’s hope the plugin really gets included in WordPress 2.7 for the better good of all WordPress users who want to perform quick category and other minor updates to many Posts.