Updating WordPress: Manual WordPress Upgrade Guide

Manual Update

These are the short instructions, if you want more check out the extended upgrade instructions. If you experience problems with the Three Step Update, you may want to review the [url=http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress_Extended]more detailed upgrade instructions

For these instructions, it is assumed that your blog’s URL is http://example.com/wordpress/.

Step 1: Replace WordPress files

  1. Get the latest WordPress zip (or tar.gz) file.
  2. Unpack the zip file that you downloaded.
  3. Delete the old wp-includes and wp-admin directories on your web host (through your FTP or shell access).
  4. Using FTP or your shell access, upload the new wp-includes and wp-admin directories to your web host, overwriting old files.
  5. Upload the individual files from the new wp-content folder to your existing wp-content folder, overwriting existing files. Do NOT delete your existing wp-content folder. Do NOT delete any files or folders in your existing wp-content directory (except for the one being overwritten by new files).
  6. Upload all new loose files from the root directory of the new version to your existing wordpress root directory.

NOTE - you should replace all the old WordPress files with the new ones in the wp-includes and wp-admin directories and sub-directories, and in the root directory (such as index.php, wp-login.php and so on). Don’t worry - your wp-config.php will be safe.

Be careful when you come to copying the wp-content directory. You should make sure that you only copy the files from inside this directory, rather than replacing your entire wp-content directory. This is where your themes and plugins live, so you will want to keep them. If you have customized the default or classic themes without renaming them, make sure not to overwrite those files, otherwise you will lose your changes. (Though you might want to compare them for new features or fixes…)

Lastly you should take a look at the wp-config-sample.php file, to see if any new settings have been introduced that you might want to add to your own wp-config.php.

Step 1.5: Remove .maintenance file
(This step shouldn’t be necessary with www.000webhost.com)

If you’re upgrading manually after a failed auto-upgrade, delete the file .maintenance from your WordPress directory using FTP. This will remove the “failed update” nag message.

Step 2: Update your installation

Visit your main WordPress admin page at /wp-admin. You may be asked to login again. If a database upgrade is necessary at this point, WordPress will detect it and give you a link to a URL like http://example.com/wordpress/wp-admin/upgrade.php. Follow that link and follow the instructions. This will update your database to be compatible with the latest code. You should do this as soon as possible after step 1.

Step 3: Do something nice for yourself

If you have caching enabled, your changes will appear to users more immediately if you clear the cache at this point (and if you don’t, you may get confused when you see the old version number in page footers when you check to see if the upgrade worked).

Your WordPress installation is successfully updated. That’s as simple as we can make it without Updating WordPress Using Subversion.

Consider rewarding yourself with a blog post about the update, reading that book or article you’ve been putting off, or simply sitting back for a few moments and letting the world pass you by.

Step 4: Final Steps

Your update is now complete, so you can go in and enable your Plugins again. If you have issues with logging in, try clearing cookies in your browser.

Troubleshooting

If anything has gone wrong, then the first thing to do is go through all the steps in our extended upgrade instructions. That page also has information about some of the most common problems we see.

If you experience problems after the upgrade, you can always restore your backup and replace the files with ones from your previous version from the [url=http://wordpress.org/download/release-archive/]release archive.

Source: Updating WordPress

2 Likes

Moved > Content Managament Systems

Thanks for the nice guide. I might have to refer to this when wordpress 3.2 is officially released, hopefully it will just work the first time though :slight_smile:

Oops, im sincerely sorry for posting this in the wrong forum section (silly me). :frowning:

Well, I just upgraded my WordPress from 3.0.1 to 3.1, which was well overdue, it had been so long since my last WordPress upgrade that I had completely forgotten about what I had did about this upgrade issue the last time, because as we all know www.000webhost.com doesn’t like the WordPress Automatic Update feature, and after searching through these forums for a possible solution, it quickly became apparent that many others would benefit from having this guide posted here.

I haven’t experienced the pleasure of trying to upgrade yet, but I’ll gladly take your word for it that it won’t go as planned.

From what I have previously read on here, the main catalyst for causing the WordPress Automatic Update feature to fail is the .zip size, I think that its because the upgrade file exceeds 2MB, and hence it fails to automatically download/unpack ect.

I know when I installed the first time the ftp timed out several times and I had to upload in several different portions. I’m not sure if the file size limit is 2mb, but that could be true. I personally think that it fails because it times out, but what do I know.

Oh well, whatever the cause, im sure that this thread will come to be very useful one day, as i’ve never previously got the WordPress Automatic Update feature to work with www.000webhost.com, but this guide is worth its weight in gold, as it works perfectly, the manual upgrade procedure is only a minor inconvenience when you follow the above simple steps. :slight_smile:

Thread temporarily stuck :slight_smile:

Hi!
I’m new around here and I’m trying to make a site to A Fine Frenzy, so I kinda needed to install wordpress on my site. But when I try to install it after updating the personal fields (database, user, server…) it gives a error message.

Does anyone have any idea how can I solve this problem?

Thank you so much

By the way, I love all these free features, thank you so much

Ok the message it’s pretty clear but the problem is I have my php working and it tells it doesn’t…

Is there anything else that needs to be saved in public_html folder? I was going to suggest clicking cleanup/reload account in cPanel and try installing again.
Only do this though if you don’t mind that account being reset to “asnew” (will only affect that one domain name, not others if you have more)

I will try to do it, and so far I only have one domain so it’s fine

Thank you:D

[Edit]
It worked :smiley: yey!

Great Tutorial…
Thanks For This Share… I Never Knew About Manual Updating…