Every Flavour Beans

Finally took the bite and tried out the upgrading process of my Wordpress blog using the Wordpress automatic upgrade plugin. Tried it directly with my main blog with not even a single test run before this.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.
The whole process was relatively smooth and void of many surprises. I wish that the output messages from each test were accumulated together and displayed somewhere(a right sidebar?) so that it gives some structure to the upgrade progress and also keeps links to important downloads always visible.

The place the plugin broke-down was when re-activating all the plugins once the upgrade process was complete. I got the error message asking me if I am sure repeat the action. It never budged even an inch from there, so I quit it and activated all my plugins one by one manually for almost fifteen frustrating minutes. Reason? Wordpress doesn’t only takes its own time but also refreshes the whole page for every plugin activation. Why not do the operation asynchronously? At least the location on the page where I am working will not be lost this way, saving me the constant scrolling.

My one complain with the Wordpress Automatic plugin is that it doesn’t allow my own Wordpress archive to be uploaded and used instead of the “latest” version automatically downloaded from Wordpress.org. It’s a good default value for those who can’t be bothered but I would definitely like to use a Subversion Wordpress package for my blog. I have been using the svn install method for over an year and it makes the minor upgrades such a breeze that I got totally used to it. And in one fluid motion, automatic upgrade plugin replaced my svn install with the normal one before I could realise what I was going to lose.

I also realised that there is only “Deactivate All Plugins” link on the “Plugins” page where as I would like to see a “Remember Currently Active Plugins and Then Deactivate All Plugins” option so that we can restore the previously active ones with a single click.