Chris Blackwell’s Domain

WordPress 2.5 was released earlier this week and it brings an array of new features that most of us have been looking forward to. However, I found the documentation on upgrading to be very vague. While the upgrade is a simple process, I thought a more detailed explanation of the steps to take would be valuable to everyone who wants to do the upgrade. I have broken down the upgrade into nine simple steps that will make sure your WordPress upgrade goes smoothly and error free.

1. Download the WordPress 2.5 package: The first thing to do is go to the WordPress homepage and download the latest WordPress package. Save the ZIP file to your desktop, or wherever is easiest for you to manage. Once the download is complete unzip the entire package. You should now have a folder named wordpress with all the new WordPress files in it. I recommend renaming this folder to new-wordpress so not to get confused later on.
2. Backup your database: I hope this goes without saying but I’ve put it down here just as a reminder. You should download your complete database in full structure and data. I use the plugin WP-DB-Backup, which sends daily backups of my WordPress database to my email automatically. I highly recommend this extension as it allows you to automate your backup process.
3. Download all your files: Even though you are going to be replacing all your old files with the new WordPress files it will be good to have a backup of the old ones for restore purposes. If anything goes wrong with the upgrade you will now have all the files and the database from before the upgrade. The other part here is that you will need the contents of the wp-content folder and the wp-config.php file after you upload all the new WordPress files.
4. Edit the wp-config.php file: Open up the folder with the new WordPress files in it. In this folder there should be a file named wp-config-sample.php. Rename this file to wp-config.php then open it in a text editor. Here you will be able to enter your database name, username and password. You can get this information from the wp-config.php file from your old WordPress files which you just downloaded. Most of the other settings in this file can usually be left as default, but check with your host to make sure.
5. Upload new WordPress files: Once you have downloaded all the old WordPress files it will be time to upload the new ones. I recommend deleting the old files on your web server first, just to make sure your FTP program doesn’t skip over any by accident. Find the folder you renamed earlier to new-wordpress and upload all the new files in the folder to the same directory that you just removed your old WordPress files from.
6. Upload the old wp-content folder: Go back to your old WordPress files which you downloaded earlier and upload your plugins, uploaded files, and themes from the wp-content folder. This is a good time to check your plugins directory to make sure you are not uploading any old plugins which you are not using anymore.
7. Update your WordPress database to version 2.5 : Point your browser to www.your-domain.tld/wp-admin/upgrade.php and a WordPress update page should appear. Click on continue and your database upgrade should be underway. Depending on the amount of content on your website, this may be instantaneous or could take a few minutes. When the upgrade is complete, you should now be running WordPress 2.5. Go to the WordPress dashboard to check for any messages or errors that may have been logged.
8. Upgrade Plugins: One of my favorite features of WordPress 2.5 is the automatic plugin upgrades. From the dashboard, click on Plugins on the right hand side beside Settings. If any of your plugins have upgrades available, you will see an Upgrade plugin link below them. If any of your plugins need an update, just click this link and let WordPress do the rest.
9. Check for any errors: At this stage your WordPress blog should be running and stable with version 2.5. Check your site for any coding errors that may pop-up if you have any code reliant on version 2.3 or earlier. In most cases there won’t be any errors as the template code has not changed very much, but if there are any, make notes and start Googling for answers.

One final note that is not a step but is equally important. Do this upgrade when your traffic is at a minimum. Go to your statistics program that you use and look to see what time of day your traffic is at a minimum. For my site it is between 4:00 am to 7:00 am. So ideally I would preform this upgrade at around 5:30 am and give myself a good hour to check for errors and downtime, before traffic starts picking up again. I hope this guide has you well on your way to WordPress 2.5. What do you think of WordPress 2.5? Was it everything you were hoping for? How would you change it?

Drupal 6 has been out for a little over a month now and I just finished converting the Xray Sierra website to it. On the surface it looks very similar to Drupal 5 but there are some great new features that I love and important improvements that will build the way to Drupal 7.

Upgrading Drupal

Upgrading from Drupal 5.x is relatively easy and I didn’t have any major problems that I found. You first must uninstall all themes and modules and then put the site in off-line mode. You can not upgrade from Drupal 4.x to Drupal 6. You must first upgrade to version 5 and then to 6. Most modules are not yet compatible with Drupal 6 and that will hold a lot of people back for a while.

OpenID Now Included

The inclusion of the OpenID module is a great victory for the OpenID community. I have been a long supporter of OpenID and I am very glad that Drupal has decided to include it with their list of core modules. OpenID is not activated by default and must be turned on by navigating to Site Building => Modules, then checking the box next to OpenID and saving the new settings.

Should I upgrade now?

I found the upgrade relatively easy. There were a few problems with the existing template I had on my Drupal site, but only because the new theme engine has changed a little. The extensions were a big issue as many of the most popular extensions have not been upgraded to support Drupal 6 as of yet. If you are an early adopter and love have the latest version installed on everything, then by all means go ahead. You will find Drupal 6 to be quite useful and stable, but extension-less.

Web 3.0 and the semantic web have taken some big steps forward as of late. Last week Yahoo! announced that they will be opening up their Open Search platform to allow third parties semantic information to be placed in the search results for a relevant query.

What is the semantic web?

For those who don’t know, the semantic web is the ability to label data according to a set of standard tags for categorization and reference. For example; a contact page usually has some standard information posted on it including phone numbers, email accounts, IM contacts, etc. However, there is no way for a search engine or computer to discern information. Any modern day search engine can read the numbers, the email addresses, the IM addresses but would not be able to asses which number is associated with which person or department.

Using the semantic web, information can be easily tagged including phone and fax numbers and ay other important information readily available to the user. This information is now labelled and accessible to a search engine for usage. If a user searched for ABC Company, the search engine would be able to list ABC Company’s address, phone number, hours of operation and email addresses, all on the search engine results page.

I am really looking forward to the semantic web and what it will bring to a user’s experience of a website or web application. The semantic web will allow users to aggregate data into a clean, and readable format. They will not be bombarded with useless information any longer while trying to find a very specific subject. I predict we will see the semantic web take some big steps forward this year, but I expect it’s break-out will happen in 2009.

WebsiteGrader.com is a new web tool that grades your website based on the marketing effectiveness of your site. I’ve been playing with the site over the last couple of days and it seems to do a pretty good job on grading websites and informing websites owners on what they need to change. The web tool is made by HubSpot, who I am sure are using it as a promotional tool for their business. I can’t say I blame them and I believe that tools like this are a great way to promote your business.

Positives

The site is very well laid out and doesn’t waste your time with too many options or clicks. As soon as you get to the home screen you are presented with a form that has you put in your website URL. There are three optional fields that follow and that can help improve your report quality. Entering keywords will provide the basis of your site report and on how well your site ranks for the listed terms. The second field allows you to put in the competitors website so your report will display a competitive analysis of your competitors sites. The final field is for putting in your email address if you want to receive updates and/or have the report emailed to you.

The report itself is extremely well laid out and easy to read. The report is broken down into On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, Blog Analysis, Social Networking popularity, and your competitive analysis. The sub-sections are broken down very well. The report lists number of header tags, duplicates of H1 tags as warnings, image alt tag analysis, Google PageRank, and so much more than I could go into here.

Negatives

The site seems to be slow to update it’s grades of a website. One site I tested scored a 83% and the Website Grader made some recommendations to improve. I made the recommendations and went back to the Website Grader page to try out the new changes. The changes did not appear on the resubmissions which leads me to believe that the website indexes the sites that have been “graded” and takes a while to refresh them. This is a problem for people who are trying to tweak their site on the fly and I hope HubSpot will fix this problem shortly.

Conclusion

Website Grader is an excellent tool for anyone who has created a website and needs to check how their site appeals to a search engine. The site is tailored more towards beginners to intermediate users. I would love to see this service expanded into a professional offering with more features and advanced reporting. Overall I think this is a great initial launch and I have to congratulate HubSpot on a job well done.