Have you upgraded yet?
April 16, 2008 by Emily
Around the Web
WordPress 2.5 has been out for over 2 weeks, have you upgraded yet? I waited about a week to make sure there were no major issues right after the release, but as of this past weekend all my personal/business WP sites as well an a good portion of my client’s sites have been upgraded. If you haven’t upgraded yet, what are you waiting for?
I’ve come across several bloggers who are waiting for the release of 2.5.1. I can’t really blame them for this logic. It should fix all of the major bugs that have cropped up and by the time it comes out in two or three weeks time, plugin authors who were behind the times, should have finally upgraded their plugins. Normally, I might agree with them and for a moment, I even considered this myself, until I read this announcement on Technorati that “vulnerable” WordPress blogs are no longer being indexed. What constitutes a vulnerable blog? Anything that is NOT WordPress 2.5.
This announcement seemed kind of bullying to me at first: UPGRADE OR ELSE! But they have a point. There are valid security problems in older versions of WP. If you care about your site, then security should be your number 1 concern. I certainly don’t mean to post this to scare people or to say that there is anything wrong with using WordPress, but I know from years of first hand experience that MANY people do not take security seriously. I can promise you, as soon as your site has been hacked, this is something you are going to take seriously. A few days ago I upgraded a WordPress site that was still using version 1.5! That’s at least 2 years old and there’s really no excuse for it. If you don’t keep current you are pretty much inviting hackers to your website.
Matt made a great post the other day and I suggest you read it because he makes some great points about security issues and WordPress. As he points out, “if it takes you more than 5 minutes to upgrade your blog, you’re doing it wrong.” There are also plugins to make upgrades even simpler.
I’ve heard a lot of people complaining about plugin and theme incompatibilities, but in all the upgrades I’ve done in the past week, I’ve probably come across hundreds of plugins and I have found NOT ONE that was incompatible (after I upgraded the newest version of the plugin, that is). If you’re not sure, there’s a list. There were a few that were incompatible right after the new version came out, but they have since been updated. 2.5 has been in development for a LONG time, so a good plugin author should have updated by now if their plugin was incompatible. If they haven’t, why not go their site and remind them? Many plugin developers have a donate button, so if you love their plugin so much, why not put your money where your mouth is and really encourage them to update. One of the great features of 2.5 is automatic plugin upgrades, so you shouldn’t have this problem anymore (assuming the plugin author keeps up his end).
As far as theme issues, I can’t think of anything that would break a theme unless you are one of those people who haven’t upgraded in years. In which case, it’s worth it to spend some time (or money if you need to hire a designer) updating your theme to use the new and updated WP features like tags, bookmarks and gravatars.
And finally, I wanted to remind Swank Web Hosting customers that I do WordPress upgrades for FREE, but you have to contact me and ask for it. 
Other posts around the web on this subject:
- SecurityFocus SQL Injection Bogus
- Weblog Tools Collection: Vulnerable WordPress Blogs Not Being Indexed
- Geek Ramblings: Upgrade or Else
- Speckyboy: Top 10 Security and Protection Plugins for WP
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Becky Says:
I upgraded, and I STILL have trouble placing photos. Also, my Technorati authority numbers have been dropping AFTER I upgraded. What’s up with that? I wish WP had worked out the bugs BEFORE releasing the upgrade.
April 21, 2008 at 7:55 am |Emily Says:
There are several suggestions for fixing problems with the uploader/media library in this post:
http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2008/04/01/faq-on-wordpress-25/
As for Technorati, those numbers are gathered from certain site stats and have nothing to do with what CMS your blog is running on. I found this article that explains how they come up with those numbers:
http://technorati.com/weblog/2007/05/354.html
April 21, 2008 at 12:15 pm |Becky Says:
I’ve seen that link. Read thru it several times. Still can’t fix my problem. Let me know if you can take a look at my blog sometime.
April 24, 2008 at 4:12 pm |