Tag Archives: hosting

April 2010 Meetup Notes: WordPress Q & A

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Anet wants to carpool from the North Bay to WordCamp on May 1st. If you’re planning to drive down from that area, contact her at anetdunne [at] gmail [dot] com.

Sepehr wants to work on Hybrid theme framework – Linda Shum has experience with this and offers to talk to him after the meetup.

Darren asks about child themes. There’s a nice updated article in the Codex (http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes), but basically a child theme is a way to customize a theme without changing the original theme files, so when the theme is updated, you don’t lose your customizations. Lori’s presentation shows us a child theme of twentyten, the new default theme for WordPress 3.0.

Linda wants to know about using jQuery in WordPress; she’s had some trouble with it. Anca does too—Bill has a link from Digging into WordPress: http://digwp.com/2009/06/including-jquery-in-wordpress-the-right-way/, and adds that you should read the comments.

We talk a bit about security and about hosting, which are related topics right now because of the so-called Pharma Hack that’s going around. Sallie has a collection of bookmarks on WordPress security at http://delicious.com/authorizer/wordpress+security. Regarding this particular hack, you should check your file permissions. There’s a plugin to help you do this called ServerBuddy by PluginBuddy.com (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/serverbuddy-by-pluginbuddy/). It will check your file and folder permissions and will also (as a bonus) tell you whether the fabulous BackupBuddy plugin will run on your site. (You have to pay for that one, but if you’re a developer who has to migrate sites a lot, you’ll find it’s worth it.)

Speaking of hosts, good choices for WordPress hosting are Bluehost, HostGator, and Liquid Web. (Anca and Lori are both Liquid Web resellers.) There’s also a new service called Page.ly that will handle your backups and updates in addition to hosting your WP site, for $14.99/month.

We will hold a future meetup on the topic of security, and if we don’t find an expert to speak on the subject, Anca and Sallie (the backup expert) and Lou Anne will do it together. Meanwhile, if you want to know more about backup plugins for WordPress, see http://www.fileslinger.com/tags/wordpress/).

Sepehr asks about plugins for making your archives more interesting. Sallie suggests the Snazzy Archives plugin, which puts all of your archives on one page.

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Darren asks about improvements to the Custom Fields interface; Trish says she knows of a good plugin, Custom Field Template.

The winner of this month’s book drawing (for Sams Teach Yourself WordPress in 10 Minutes) was Valerie Fahs-Thatcher. We’ll be keeping an eye out for your Amazon review, Valerie, and I hope the book is helpful.

Announcements

Anca’s WordPress class at TechLiminal starts Monday, April 19th. If you want to learn more about WordPress, sign up at http://techliminal.com/learn-2-wordpress/.

The WordPress Bay Area Foothills (that’s the South Bay) Meetup, run by Lou Anne McKeefery and Ann Zerega, meets this Wednesday evening at the Milpitas Library. The speaker is Alex King from the WP Help Center. RSVP at http://www.meetup.com/Wordpress-Bay-Area-CA-Foothills/. (This month you can attend by telephone.)

The Bay Area (meaning San Francisco) WordPress Meetup, in a fit of bad planning, also scheduled its meeting for Wednesday, April 21. They’re talking about “totally awesome plugins and themes.” You can RSVP at http://www.meetup.com/wordpress-sf/.

Manual Upgrades Are Not a Thing of the Past

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What is it with certain webhosts? I mean, I know that none of the Fantastico-type installers have yet caught up to the fact that you can upgrade WordPress automatically from within the dashboard, so whenever you log into your control panel, it’s going to tell you that you need to upgrade even though you already did. (I found that “upgrading” through Cpanel when I have already upgraded is safe in BlueHost; I have not tried doing the equivalent with GoDaddy or DreamHost.)

But some web hosting companies seem determined to cut you off entirely from the automatic upgrade and install features of the latest versions of WordPress. And the absolute worst culprit I have yet discovered is Earthlink. Attempts at upgrading automatically not only don’t work, they manage to wipe out the active theme folder, much to the dismay of my client, who then needs me to go in, restore her theme, and handle the upgrade manually.

I have no idea why Earthlink sets it up this way, but the ability of WordPress to function rests on the existence of a file called Earthlink.dat, created when the Earthlink staff first installed WordPress. I’m not really interested in the technical details of why this problem exists, since I believe the best solution is for my client to switch web hosts. Their “starter site” plan costs more than twice what everyone else is charging, and I’m not hearing wonderful things about their service. (It was different back when my cousin Jason the Mac geek worked there.)

And this isn’t the only client whose WordPress site I’ve had to upgrade manually of late. In some cases, the installation was too old to upgrade automatically and wouldn’t work with the wonderful Instant Upgrade plugin. In others, there appeared to be some kind of permissions block. Either way, I’ve pretty much memorized the not-very-complicated instructions from the WordPress Codex.

Step 1: Replace WordPress files

  1. Get the latest WordPress. Either download and extract it to your computer or download it directly to the server.
  2. Delete your old wp-includes and wp-admin directories.
  3. Copy the new WordPress files to your server, overwriting old files in the root, except perhaps the wp-content folder (see “NOTE” below). Note that this means *all* the files, including all the files in the root directory as well. If you use the default or classic theme and have customized it, then you can skip that theme.

NOTE   The wp-content folder requires special handling, as do the plugins and themes folders. You should copy over the contents of these folders, not the entire folder. In some cases, copying the entire folder may overwrite all your customizations and added content.

Also take care to preserve the content of the wp-config.php file in the root directory. This file contains current settings for your existing installation, e.g. database sign-in information.

Step 2: Upgrade your installation

Visit your main WordPress admin page at /wp-admin. You may be asked to login again. If a database upgrade is necessary at this point, WordPress will detect it and give you a link to a URL like http://example.com/wordpress/wp-admin/upgrade.php. Follow that link and follow the instructions. This will update your database to be compatible with the latest code. If you fail to do this step, your blog might look funny.

This is not difficult, or even very time-consuming. It’s just tedious. And it shouldn’t be necessary.