WordPress has released version 3.2. There are big changes in this release so it pays to do a bit of checking before doing the upgrade.

Because of the changes your server must have different requirements than previously needed. You must be running at least PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0 to run the new version.

You can check with your server host to make sure of what your site is running or there is a WordPress plugin you can add to see if your current server configuration is okay.

Go to Plugins ? Add New and search for “health check” (it should be the first result). Install it, activate it, and it will tell you if you need to update anything.

If you do then contact your host to get them to make the appropriate changes.

Now the upgrade is not supposed to be able to be done if your server is not properly set up but as mine are I have not been able to test it.

Finally, there may be some plugins that will cause trouble with the new version. Make sure to deactivate your plugins before upgrading. (Yeah I know it is in the instructions but we all tend to get lazy on this type of thing.)

If you use Digi List Builder or Digi Viral Traffic plugins, Andy has already released upgrades and you should have received an email with the new download. (One of the reasons I like Andy’s plugins. He always stays on top of them.)

You can see what is new in my review of the beta release of 3.2.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: server configuration, server host, upgrade wordpress, wordpress, WordPress 3.2

WordPress just released a security update for version 3.1.

This update covers per the WordPress blog

With as easy as the upgrade process has become would recommend that you upgrade. The upgrade video is below.

If you are uncomfortable with upgrading then you can get me to do it for you.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: upgrade wordpress, wordpress, wordpress 3.1.3, WordPress security

The latest update from WordPress addresses a security flaw and a few minor bugs that missed the last update.The security flaw fix is primarily for multi author blogs. Here is the notice.

Contributor level users could publish directly.

With as easy as the upgrade process has become would recommend that you upgrade. The upgrade video is below.

If you are uncomfortable with upgrading then you can get me to do it for you.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: upgrade wordpress, wordpress 3.1.2

WordPress just announced a new security release for version 3.1.1.

Here is the haiku for this release as it is quite appropriate and succinct.

Only the geeks know
What half this stuff even means
Don’t worry — update

Good advice. Security releases should be upgraded sooner rather than later. This release is all security or performance enhancements.

Here is a list of the updates.

• Some security hardening to media uploads
• Performance improvements
• Fixes for IIS6 support
• Fixes for taxonomy and PATHINFO (/index.php/) permalinks
• Fixes for various query and taxonomy edge cases that caused some plugin compatibility issues

Here is a video of how to upgrade your blog to the latest version.

I recommend you upgrade as soon as possible. If you are uncomfortable with upgrading then you can get me to do it for you.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: blog, performance enhancements, security releases, upgrade wordpress, wordpress 3.1.1

Well it is finally here WordPress has just released the latest version 3.1. Now as this is a feature update and not a security update you may want to wait a bit if you are a technophobe.

Have upgraded a couple of mine and they are working fine with the plugins I use as I have been testing all along with the release candidates.

If the new features are must have take the chance and upgrade to take advantage of them. (More about those further down.) If not, it is rare that despite beta testing and numerous release candidates there is not something found once it goes into wide spread release.

Even think that Matt Mullenweg may even be reading this blog. Here is the email I just received and remember I was looking for a Valentine’s Day release.

Missed you on Valentine’s day. We were busy, busy, busy coding away on this WordPress thing. It’s blogging software but people have started using it for pretty much everything, powering their entire website.

The new 3.1 release is pretty cool, it has a new admin bar so you’re never more than one-click from your admin and adding links in the WYSIWYG is now like 42x faster and includes a lookup to make it easy to link to your own posts and pages.

What’s New With 3.1

• Redesigned linking workflow
• Admin bar
• Streamlined writing interface
• Refreshed blue admin scheme
• Post Formats support
• New CMS capabilities
• New Network Admin
• Advanced taxonomy and custom fields queries

Some of these features are good. I am loving the admin bar. If I am logged in and go to the blog I can get back to where I want (add a post, check comments, see stats just by clicking the bar at the top of the blog.

Post formats is something I will be using and writing about soon.

So if you use WordPress more for a CMS than a blog you will love this version. There is a lot to take advantage of there.

As I always do when we get a new release I put the easy upgrade video below but remember that upgrading or not depends on how important the new features are to you. If they are not wait for the first update.

The process has not changed since 2.7 so the video is still valid.

Look for more on WordPress 3.1 over the next week or so as it gets a wider distribution.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: upgrade wordpress, whats new wordpress 3.1, WordPress 3.1

Things often get stuck in my head. Does not always make sense as to why, but it happens. May be a function of age and baldness or maybe I am just getting senile. Hard to say.

One of the things that stuck was what WordPress wrote when announcing WordPress 3.1 Release candidate 2

“Beta 1 came on Thanksgiving, RC1 on Christmas, and RC2 on New Year’s Day. We won’t be waiting for another holiday for the final release”

Well because that stuck in my mind and we now have an RC4, will it be a Valentine’s Day release?

See I told you strange thoughts sometimes travel through my gray matter and quite truthfully it will come when it comes. I much prefer it be right than be released to meet a deadline.

WordPress does a great job with improving the software and this is not a knock on them but after that statement wouldn’t it be true justice to see 3.1 on Monday?

That is my rambling today what do you think? Leave your comments below.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: upgrade wordpress, Valentines Day, WordPress 3.1

Woke up this morning to an email from WordPress on a critical update. They rarely use the word critical in their updates but this one affected “it fixes a core security bug in our HTML sanitation library, called KSES”.

Strongly recommend that even though it is a holiday week and 3.1 is not far away that you make the upgrade ASAP.

Have added the upgrade video below as the process has not changed for a while you can ignore the version number on the video.

Unlike the last upgrade which only affected some this one affects all.

Here is the video.

Want me to do it for you? Click here.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: security bug WordPress, security wordpress, upgrade wordpress

Hopefully you have been paying attention to the new upgrade from WordPress. WordPress had a recent security update to WordPress 3.0.2.

As sure as the dawn follows the night we are now in the midst of seeing more than the usual number of plugin upgrades too.

This happens quite often when WordPress makes structural changes for security purposes and it is important to upgrade the plugins too.

Now with the number I have seen over the last few days I felt a reminder was needed. Now will you heed it?

The upgrade video is below. With the new WordPress versions upgrading your plugins is a snap.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: upgrade plugins, upgrade wordpress

Was answering comments and saw a new update notice from WordPress. According to their blog “is a mandatory security update for all previous WordPress versions.”

Fixes a moderate security issue per their release.

Below is a video on upgrading your blog that shows the one click upgrade. It has not changed since 2.7 so despite the version it is what you need to do to upgrade yours.

Want me to do it for you? Click here.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: upgrade wordpress, WordPress 3.0.2, WordPress security update

Todays question brings up a good point about people being afraid to ask questions because they may look dumb or stupid. It amazes me when I see this and shortly before I sat down to write this I was answering a similar concern in a forum.

This was a person who was offered answers for the questions they had but would not ask because of fear of looking stupid. Well let me tell you the only stupid questions are the ones you don’t ask as you never get an answer. Feel free to leave your questions in the comments below whether you think they are stupid or not. If you have the question there are probably a lot of others that do too.

As you know some people are just shy and don’t want to look dumb by asking an obvious question that they may need the answer to. It is good that you are giving them the chance to step up and ask the questions to get answered. When manually upgrading your site should you turn off the plugins before you do it? There, I will get the party started.

The short answer is yes you should disable your plugins before upgrading as a bad plugin can keep you from getting access back after you upgrade until it is removed or renamed.

With the latest versions of WordPress you can disable all of the plugins at once so it is not a huge time saver to not do it.

Just as important though is to make sure that your plugins are kept current. Most of the problems I have seen happen when upgrading from plugins is that the plugin had an update that was skipped.

For the most part the vast majority of plugin authors keep current with the changes in WordPress. If you paid attention to the number of updates to plugins that came through once the release candidate for version 3.0 was released you would have seen 3-4 times the number of updates than what you would normally expect.

My advice is that even before you upgrade the version make sure that you have upgraded all of your plugins that need it.

Again feel free to leave your comments and your questions below in the comment areas.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: plugins, questions, upgrade wordpress