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. Get the details at Profitable Blog Steps

Technorati Tags: plugins, questions, upgrade wordpress

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WordPress just released a new upgrade last night to the 3.0 series. This is a security release and fixes over 50 minor items.

I did the upgrades here and it worked well.

These are primarily security fixes so I would do the upgrade now. If you have been waiting for the first upgrade before switching to 3.0 then now is the time to switch over.

The video I created when WordPress first added the auto upgrade to the dashboard is below because the procedure has not changed.

If you are not comfortable with doing the upgrade you can always have me do it for you. Just check it out 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. Get the details at Profitable Blog Steps

Technorati Tags: upgrade wordpress, wordpress, wordpress 3.0.1

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Well it will remain to be seen whether they follow through with it but WordPress has announced that it will not be supporting PHP 4 and MySQL 4 when version 3.2 is released in early 2011.

The reason I say that it remains to be seen is that this was originally announced to happen with the release of 3.0 if my memory is correct (and it may have been earlier).

Now the majority of web hosts are currently running PHP 5.2 and MySQL 5 and it is easy to check through Cpanel if you are running the proper versions. Log in to Cpanel and check your general server information and you should see what version you are running.

There is plenty of time to get your server upgraded before this comes into play and the new version will not update if your server will not support it.

You can see the full detailed announcement from WordPress here.

Remember that your questions and comments are welcomed so leave them in the 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. Get the details at Profitable Blog Steps

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Was going through my reader this morning to see what the latest was on WordPress and ran across this news story – New Wave of Injection Attacks Targets WordPress Blogs. The key point of the story though is that the hackers are doing automated scans to find vulnerable blogs to add their php injection into. Not exactly the news I am looking for first thing Sunday morning. The only good part of it was it did give me a reason to rant .

Now the fact these people are dirt bags is undisputed and they will always be here but if people would take small steps to keep their sites secure by just doing the simple things they could make sure that they aren’t the victim. Over the last few versions WordPress has made it super simple to keep things updated yet I can’t begin to tell you the number of people that still don’t take advantage of them.

After all it is kind of hard to not know when there are updates when you log in to your blog. It is sitting right there in the left hand side when you log in or at the top if it is a version change. You can easily upgrade right then and there and you should.

Now it would be nice if there were no thing such as hackers looking to take advantage of any flaws but that is not likely to change. After all some do it just because they can, others to drive traffic to make money. Either way they create a problem for you if you get targeted.

Now keeping updated is not fool proof as they are always looking for new ways to take advantage of your blog but it sure will move the odds in your favor. So is your blog updated?

Leave your comments and any questions you may have below. Questions will be used for future blog posts so stop back to get the answer.

Less than 48 hours for the $10 discount on Profitable Blog Steps so grab your copy today.

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. Get the details at Profitable Blog Steps

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Wrote my daily post earlier and was even talking with a friend this morning and was asked when are they going to release 3.0. Said to him should be any day then I log back in and see the upgrade notice.

Now I have been running the release candidates for quite some time on the beta blog. Even did a new install on a testing domain to try the new MU (multi user) functionality.

The upgrade here went fine but I had backups before I hit the update button of the files I need and the data base. Force of habit for me.

You should turn off all of your plugins before doing the upgrade and make sure you have backups.

The actual upgrade is easy and the same as it has been for a while. Here is the video I did a while back for using the new upgrade function within the dashboard so it will show an earlier version.

One thing I have noticed already is that the dashboard converted to the default. If you have customized it to your tastes you will have to redo it.

Lots of new functionality in this not all of which you will need but I will be reviewing it as time goes on. More later this week.

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. Get the details at Profitable Blog Steps

Technorati Tags: backup wordpress, upgrade wordpress, WordPress 3.0

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WordPress just releasd the second beta version of WordPress 3.0. Just started testingit on the beta blog. If this goes well you can look for a release candidate shortly.

After that the actual release usually comes out quite quickly.

Will be reporting more next week after I have had a chance to play with this release and see what if any trouble I find with it.

Tell you more anout it then because I really want to play with the multiple blog portion of it so will set up a separate test just for that.

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Got an email yesterday from a good friend with an SOS in it. Basically the message was I screwed up my blog and it no longer shows online.

Now I sent back on email asking exactly what they had done and got this response.

I uploaded wordpress by hand using the directions at http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress

 

I must have done something wrong though…

Those directions are very complete and I have never had trouble when using them. I have upgraded blogs literally hundreds of times for my own and my customers.

I checked the blog and the things that normally go wrong. After all this is not the first time I have had some one have trouble and give me a holler.

None of the usual suspects like a config file that had been overwritten had happened. Gave this person a call and started asking questions. Doing that showed there had been a step or two that were skipped.

In this case the problem was caused by not turning off the plugins before upgrading. As the blog was on a very, very old version the plugins were causing a huge problem. It was very easy to fix once I knew what step had not been completed before upgrading the blog.

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The point of this post though is not the problem that was created or the fix. The point is that often we skip steps even though if someone asks you would say I did what this says.

This is particularly important when you are following some one else’s steps to get a result. Let’s take getting traffic to your blog.

In 15 Minute Blog Traffic I cover a number of steps to do regularly to increase the traffic to your blog. The key to making it work is to do them on a regular basis.

If you do them all and do them consistently the system works. If you only occasionally do them or only do one or two your results will be inconsistent.

So if you are following a system and find that it is not working take a minute to review and make sure that you are not skipping steps. All too often when you think a system does not work it is your implementation rather than the system that is causing your lack of results.

It usually is with me and I am sure that most of the time it is with you too.

Leave a comment and let me know if you have found this to be true.

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WordPress just released a new version for the 2.9 series. This is a very limited security update. It is mainly for multi-author blogs.

Per the WordPress blog they were alerted to a problem

a problem where logged in users can peek at trashed posts belonging to other authors. If you have untrusted users signed up on your blog and sensitive posts in the trash, you should upgrade to 2.9.2.

The majority of readers here are probably not effected but you should be aware.

Added the video on upgrading if you need it below.

The method of upgrading has not changed so even though it says 2.7.1 it is still valid.

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. Get the details at Profitable Blog Steps

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As I mentioned previously WordPress would have a relatively quick update to the new 2.9 version. It was just released. This was done primarily to fix a problem with some hosts on scheduled posts and trackbacks.

There were quite a few other minor changes but those two were the big reasons. You can see more about this at the announcement post WordPress 2.9.1.

If you have not upgraded to 2.9.1 you can upgrade directly to this version from your previous version.

I have added the video on backing up your database and the automatic upgrade below. That has not changed since 2.7 so the video is current despite the title .

Will get back to answering your questions tomorrow. As always you can add questions you would like addressed or 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. Get the details at Profitable Blog Steps

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Well as they predicted earlier this week when they put out a release candidate they released WordPress 2.9 by the end of the week.

I had hoped that the author of Simple Tags would get an update out to make it work as they have done on the last 2 major releases. It hasn’t happened yet and as this is not a security update I will not be pushing to upgrade quickly.

If in a week there is no update on Simple Tags then I will be looking for a replacement and once I test it only then will I be upgrading all of my blogs.

Simple tags was the only plugin that I have been recommending that seems not to work with this version and I do expect an update shortly. Then it will be time to take advantage of some of the new features.

I did add in the upgrade video for those that do not use Simple Tags.

Will keep you updated and put out some more information as the plugin compatibility gets resolved.

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. Get the details at Profitable Blog Steps

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