It only took me a handful of minutes to upgrade my three blogs including this one to WordPress 3 this weekend and I didn’t really do a manually method but relied on my hosting provider (HostMonster) which makes use of SimpleScripts to take care of the upgrades (which worked flawlessly).
I did however take manual backups of my WordPress Install both the SQL database and the Themes/Plugins folders in case something went wry, you always want to make sure you have a fresh backup.
I did a WordPress SQL Demonstration which shows you how to backup your SQL Database manually through your hosting providers MyPHPAdmin function. If you have never seen your wordpress database with MyPHPAdmin then you should check this link and video out.
Meanwhile the one annoying thing of upgrading to WordPress 3 is all the modules on my Dashboard and in my posts got rearranged back to a default layout so it took me about 5 minutes per blog to resort and organize where I had the placement of all my modules.
I noticed a new plug-in menu called “Drop Ins” that I haven’t seen before, but I don’t know what classifies a plug-in as a drop in just yet.
All the media icons for uploading have changed a little bit, as well as the dashboard is a bit more gray/white. The most interesting thing for me however is the “Menus” function under the Appearance tab as this will allow you to create custom menu’s if they are built in for your theme, and this makes WordPress 3 themes out of box compete a little more with the high cost wordpress themes I think once some free themes start implementing. Right now if your theme doesn’t support the menu functions you can insert a menu widget in your sidebar and use the custom menu’s that way. Who knows, I might even modify my dragonblogger theme to do the custom menu’s instead of the way pages are setup right now at the top bar. I like the idea of hitting pages and showing a list of links instead of limited to one page/link at top, I will see what I can come up with.
You can also see other people’s upgrade experience and recommendations for upgrading to WordPress 3.
- BloggerDesign writes about 3 things to do before upgrading to WordPress 3.
- Karen over at BlazingMinds writes about her Memory Issues when upgrading to WordPress 3.
- UpcomingTechnology provides 6 tips for manually upgrading your WordPress blog which an be applied to all wordpress upgrades.
- Selurus had an easy and simple upgrade to WordPress 3 as well, and you can read about it.
- SmartBloggerz was an early adopter and upgraded to WordPress 3 as soon as it was released as well.
- You can learn more about WordPress 3 Thelonius here at the official wordpress site.
What are your thoughts and impressions of WordPress 3? Have you upgraded yet, have you run into any problems? Let me know and leave a link to your post and I will include it in my round up here.
-Dragon Blogger