Upgrading WordPress Manually

The second and least used method of upgrading WordPress is the manual method. The method is least used mainly because the automatic method, discussed in the preceding section, is so quick and easy to accomplish. However, certain circumstances — probably related to the inability of your hosting environment to accommodate the automatic method — exist where you can manually upgrade WordPress, so we include the description of the process here.

To upgrade WordPress manually:

  1. Back up your WordPress Web site and deactivate all plugins.

    Refer to Steps 1 and 2 in the preceding “Upgrading WordPress Automatically” section.

  2. Navigate to the WordPress Updates page by clicking the Please Update Now link.
  3. Click the Download button.

    This opens a dialog box that allows you to save the .zip file of the latest WordPress download package to your local computer, as shown in Figure 6-6.

    Figure 6-6: Down-loading the WordPress files to your local computer.

    image

  4. Select a location to store the download package and click Save.

    The .zip file downloads to your selected location on your computer.

  5. Browse to the .zip file on your computer.
  6. Unzip the file.

    Use a program like WinZip (www.winzip.com).

  7. Connect to your Web server via FTP.

    See Book II, Chapter 2 for a refresher on how to use FTP.

  8. Delete all the files and folders in your existing WordPress installation directory except the following: ...

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