It’s cause for celebration here at LifeIntrigued.  5 years ago to the month (the month coincidence being a complete surprise when I did a quick search) I went through the scary and stressful process of upgrading the WordPress engine that powers this blog.  My complete admiration to the WordPress developers for putting out a solid product that hasn’t failed me once in that timeframe.  From one developer to another .. bang up job!  During the course of those 5 years there has been a number of upgrades that were released but when something is working perfectly you generally don’t risk destabilizing it.  There is one situation that does cause concern and that is when a security issues is identified and that is exactly what happened about a month back.  My provider (Go Daddy) informed me that my site was vulnerable to takeover and highly recommended upgrading immediately.  To that point I had not discovered any issues, but about a week after that my site was being pounded by spam comments all written in Chinese.  Akismet successfully caught every one of them but it was unnerving and the timing with the vulnerability was too close to ignore.  7 years of blogging wasn’t something I wanted to risk losing so started the long process of backing up the control files and then started investigating what it was going to take to perform the upgrade – the last time was fairly involved and assumed I needed to dedicate some time to learning what to do.  During that investigation I learned that the last upgrade included a new upgrade tool that basically did all the work for you.  Could this be too good to be true… well, let’s just say the actual upgrade process took me an amazing 10 minutes to complete and most of that time was simply validating the upgrade.  Once again the WordPress crew have delivered a top notch product.  The blog is now officially at release level Benny or more precisely WordPress 4.0 which was released on Sept 4th.  I probably won’t hesitate to stay a little more current on releases from this point on but for now this one happy blogger.  If you experience any user problems let me know and I look into it.  I went through all features I use to develop posts and previewed the outputs but I actually see a slightly different view of the reader’s perspective that has a few more controls for me to manage the content.

Well, the sweating and sleepless nights are hopefully over for a little while now.  A few weeks ago, the WordPress community was informed there was a security hole in their toolset.  I just recently found enough time to dig into the upgrade process and get the blog protected again.  Based on my preliminary tests, this effort was completely successful and quite frankly not nearly as painful as I thought it was going to be.  In fact, it probably took me longer to create the graphic for this post than it did to complete all of the tasks.  Thankfully, I took the time to upgrade back in January which lined up well with the directions I had.  Kudos to the WordPress team for the quality in their documentation.  All of my plugins successfully migrated and my theme (the part I was dreading the most) came over without a hitch.  Now I can get back to making some posts, with this one (yes, I am counting this one) I have 3 more to hit my mark.

Hopefully the script kiddies out there will keep themselves busy with Windows 7 which is coming out soon and allow me to get some sleep although it looks like I need to spend a few minutes learning this new dashboard.

Good news everyone!  I have finally completed the upgrade to the latest release of WordPress.  All in all, it was not that difficult, but due to a weak FTP client (WS_FTPro) it took a significant amount of time.  I was unable to find an option on the client that allowed deletion of non-empty directories requiring me to manually go through and delete items from each of the sub-directories.  Unless someone knows how to set this in the FTP client I used, I’ll be switching to something more friendly/useable for the future.  Everything has checked out okay and hopefully no one was impacted by the upgrade.