WordPress 3.4.2 was released on September 6, 2012 but it was only last week that I finished upgrading the sites and blogs that I maintain using WordPress as a blog publishing platform as well as a CMS or Content Management System. Finally!
Actually, updating to the new release of WordPress is quite easy. It would probably only take you a minute to do it. But with me, it is not the case. I have my own process and updating one site to a new version would take me 15-30 minutes. Even if it would only take me 15-30 minutes to update one website or blog at a time, it still took me so long to update the sites.
Every time I update, I would test each site or blog first in my local installation. If everything is fine, I would login at each of my phpmyadmin installation online and backup the database. I would use FTP or File Transfer Protocol to backup the other files. I make sure that I have everything before updating one site at a time online. If anything happens, it would not give me any headache solving a problem. After backing up everything I would probably need, I would login to my site online, one at a time, and then update to the new release.
I upgraded twenty (20) websites including blogs from WordPress 3.4.1 while the other three (3) websites were upgraded from WordPress 3.3.1. Everything went fine. I thought I will not be able to upgrade the remaining three (3) sites that I was not able to upgrade before when I upgraded the sites and blogs from WordPress 3.3.1 to WordPress 3.4.1, but upgrading them to WordPress 3.4.2 went fine too.
Remember when I was telling you about the problem with the period or dot I used instead of having the category blank or empty at this blog entry, Upgraded to WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious”? Well, that problem was solved. It was also solved when I upgraded to WordPress 3.3.1 but somehow the problem occurred again when I upgraded to WordPress 3.4.1. When I tested the sites with WordPress 3.4.1, the problem occurred with my local installation. That was what I thought so.
The sites may have worked well if I updated the database. But I normally update the database. But then again, I could not remember if I updated the database or not at my local installation. So now, I could not possibly tell you if the problem could really have been solved already when I upgraded to WordPress 3.4.1.
Nevertheless, everything went fine with WordPress 3.4.2. At first, the sites did not work well at my local installation. So I decided to revise at least three (3) files at one of the themes that I used. I especially created a new folder for the revised theme so the old theme will still be fine even before activating the new one. Then, I upgraded one (1) of the online sites to WordPress 3.4.2 without activating the revised theme yet.
I was surprised when I checked the pages online because everything was fine. I did not see the 404 Not Found page which I normally got with my local installation. Well then, there was no need to change the theme after all. With that, I upgraded the other two (2) sites and everything went fine as well.
If you decide to upgrade your site or blog to WordPress 3.4.2, please do not forget to backup your database and files.
Another thing, after I upgraded the websites and blogs, I decided to install the Jetpack plugin. Yes, I have not installed this plugin when it was released. But now, I installed it as I would like to update the WordPress Stats plugin.
Jetpack by WordPress.com is certainly very useful. I tested one of its features which is Post By Email. It works well, better than the built-in feature Post via e-mail. With Jetpack, there is not that much to configure. You just enable Post By Email at the User’s Profile.
More about Jetpack on my next blog entry. 🙂
By the way, according to WordPress.org, “WordPress 3.4.2, now available for download, is a maintenance and security release for all previous versions.” It fixed a lot of bugs found at the older WordPress releases.
Thank you, WordPress Team!