Technical ConfusionBecause Technology Is Confusing

I’ve been obsessed (which is putting it mildly) with the Caylee Anthony case for the last few weeks, and as a result, I’ve been negligent when it comes to my own sites. I decided to start working on breaking this obsession, and decided to upgrade my blogs this weekend, which was way overdue.

I decided to use the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade and see how it worked on multiple blogs.

The Wordpress upgrades went well. All except one. One site seemed to upgrade ok, except that the plug-in didn’t automatically re-activate. No problem. Turned the plug-in back on, a couple threw errors on me, upgrading the plug-in solved the problem.

To look at the site, everything was all hunky dory. My tags weren’t working, and I was trying to figure out a way to import them and use them on the updated blog, but the site wasn’t showing visible errors.

I decided to upload another plug-in, and couldn’t because I was out of space. The site had plenty of space the day before. Hmm. A quick FTP session revealed several rather large core dumps taking up all the space. I downloaded one to look at to determine the problem, which was all tag software related.

Luckily, I’m obsessive about keeping backups. Before I proceed on any project for any site, I back up. Sometimes it will be the whole site, sometimes just the folder. I deleted every file on the site, deleted the database and re-uploaded the old files. Everything works fine.

Always back up. The Wordpress Automatic Upgrade does a backup for you if you choose, but I found it does not back up your theme folder and plug-in folder. I would rather manually back my sites up, just for my own peace of mind.

In most cases, installing a Wordpress plugin is not that difficult. It’s important to read the instructions of any plugin you may want to install, in case you need to tweak any template files.

Wordpress Plugin Installation

Download and unzip the plugin. (Some come zipped, some don’t)

Read the instructions.

Upload the plugin to your /wp-content/plugins folder with FTP. (If you don’t know how to FTP, see How to FTP ) You may have to look around for this folder first, depending on your Wordpress installation.

Login to your Wordpress admin, go to your admin page. You need to go to your Plugins page.

In Wordpress 2.5, after you log into your dashboard, just look to your right, and you’ll see the plugins link.

In older versions of Wordpress, you’ll see it on the main navigation list across the top when you first login to your dashboard.

Once on the plugins page, look for the Plugin you just uploaded, and click activate. Sometimes you’ll need to look around to do some tweaking the plugin requires from within the Wordpress admin, look at all your links. Sometimes this is under Options, it could be under Plugins, or on the nav links on the first page of your admin. Sometimes a link is provided under the Plugin description after you’ve installed the Wordpress plugin.

Tweak the plugin if needed.

Walla! You’re done installing your Wordpress plugin.