One of the reasons I love using a blog rather than a static web site is the ability to interact with your readers. Yesterday I wrote about making sure you upgrade your plugins and 2 of the comments had great questions that need to be addressed.

See the interaction allows me to expand on the questions I did not think of and you get information that answers those questions.

Quick question, Mike – if the automatic update fails, does it just stop the current plugin from functioning, or can it disturb the blog installation itself? Is it important or superfluous to back up an installation just before trying to automatically install a plugin update?

Got another question for you Mike,

What if everything goes just fine with the upgrade, but once the upgrade is done you have conflicts with another plugin or the plugin just stops working with the theme you have?

How do you recover from this?

I realize that you could just un-install and re-install the old version back assuming you still have it available, but what if there is a lot of configuring that you have done with the plug-in. Do you lose all of that?

First lets address backups. You should be backing up your blog regularly. It is not necessary to do it before you upgrade a plugin because the backup process will only effect the plugin itself. It shuts off the plugin, downloads the latest version then installs it and turns it back on. If something goes wrong it has not altered any files other than that plugin.

The question really is should you back up the old plugin first? For me the answer is no. There is either an update or a security flaw or there would not be an upgrade. Worst case is I go grab the plugin and install it manually if there is a problem.

Now to the problem of what if this creates a conflict. That can and may happen and can be a royal pain in the you know what. The odds are against it but it is possible.

At that point I would have to test to see which items are conflicting. First I would try the default theme as a test. I use the default theme because that is what most plugins are tested against. If that solves the problem you know that it is the theme. Not very likely but an easy test so I would do that first. Then you have a choice of how important your plugin is versus how important your theme choice is to you.

If that was not the problem then I would start de-activating the other plugins to find out where the conflict is. Once you have isolated the two that are conflicting you have a choice to make. Which one to keep?

As there are probably a minimum of three choices of other plugins to do what any particular plugin does see what is available to replace one of the problem plugins and which features are most important to you.

Finally as to the configuration question. If you have done the configuration through the dashboard then it is saved in the data base and you will not lose anything. (The upgrade process for a plugin does not touch the data base.)

If you have edited the plugin itself (rare for most people) then I probably would not be upgrading it to begin with. I would be looking at the specs to see what was changed and any notes on why and then make a decision on it. If you are doing this type of thing you are probably already competent in the coding and would download the new one and see what changed and edit it before adding it. This probably does not apply to 1% (and that may be a high estimate) of my readers.

Again I do appreciate the interaction and the questions so feel free to continue to contribute.

Mike Paetzold

Have you check out the Twitter Effect 2.0?

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