3 Responses to “How to Install a Plugin on Your WordPress Blog”

1. 
   Keith Davis Says:
   January 5th, 2010 at 8:55 am

   Hi John
   I was looking for a video on upgrading plugins… I’ve got a few that are already out of date!

   I appreciate that there is now an automatic upgrade on most plugins but would you advise a manual upgrade over the automatic one?

   If you use a manual upgrade, would the procedure be:

   1 Backup database

   2 Deactivate plugin

   3 Upgrade new plugin to plugins directory

   4 Activate plugin

   Presumably the new version of the plugin gets all the settings etc from the database?

2. 
   John Hoff Says:
   January 5th, 2010 at 10:27 am

   Hi Keith, here’s how I do it manually, though I haven’t done it in awhile. The last time I did a manual upgrade to a plugin is when the All-In-One SEO plugin was giving me problems. I never really got it fixed, either. Not even the plugin author could help. Not even restoring everything fixed the problem, which turned out to be that the custom Title function stopped working after the upgrade.

   Whatever it did, it even made it so the Platinum SEO plugin wouldn’t show custom titles as well (to be expected though since Platinum is a rip off of All-In-One).

   Anyway, here’s how I upgrade plugins manually:

   1. Backup the database

   2. Deactivate the plugin

   3. Go to my /plugins folder and rename the plugin I’m upgrading to something else. That way it’s only a backup now and if something goes wrong, I can just delete the newly uploaded plugin and rename the old one back to what it was.

   4. Upload the new (upgraded) plugin to the /plugins directory

   5. Activate it.

   6. If all goes well, then I’ll delete the old renamed folder or .php file from the plugins directory.

3. 
   Keith Davis Says:
   January 5th, 2010 at 10:46 am

   Thanks John… renaming the old plugin sound like a bit of extra insurance.

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