Since I have been on the theme of useful, and “must have” plugins of late, I thought I would pass one on that is extremely helpful. it is called the Instant Upgrade Plugin for WordPress. This plugin does exactly what its name implies–upgrades your WordPress installation instantly. It will download the new files to your server, overwriting the old ones (except for the wp-content files and the wp-config.php file). It then installs the new installation, and runs the database upgrade. I have used this plugin to upgrade my blogs to the new WordPress 2.5.1, which is supposed to provide a security upgrade over the previous version.

When using this plugin, make sure to first download and install the WP Backup plugin that I wrote about earlier. I have not had any problems thus far with my upgrades with this plugin, but you certainly want to have backups of your work available just in case anything bad should happen!

This plugin is very easy to install and use.  Simply download the zip file, unzip it and upload the contents of the file into your plugins directory on your server.  Then, when you log in to your account, you will find the plugin listed on your plugins tab (far right hand side of the page in WordPress 2.5 and up).  Activate the plugin by clicking on the “activate” button listed with the plugin.  Next, click on your “Manage” tab, and click the heading that says “InstantUpgrade”.  The first thing you will be asked to do is to configure the plugin.  There are two options, FTP or HTTP.  I used HTTP without any problems, and you should be able to as well, unless there is a need to change file permissions.  FTP can be used if you are uncomfortable making the changes necessary on some servers for use of HTTP.  The plugin author recommends HTTP installation.

After you configure the plugin, it will run a test to make sure that your settings are valid, and that it will be able to upgrade your WordPress.  This is done in a matter of seconds.  Finally, it will inform you that you can now begin upgrading.  This setup, and configuring process only has to be done once.  After this, you can use it to upgrade with every new release of the software.

Upgrading is a snap.  Simply click on the “upgrade WordPress” button, after selecting that you want to install the latest version of WordPress.  The plugin does all the work for you, and in about 20 seconds (or less) you will be running the latest version of WordPress!

Enjoy!

I had another one of those “learn from experience” moments yesterday. If you tried to visit this blog any time over the last 3 days, you may have found my site down. It seems that my web host has been having some problems, particularly with their databases. When I finally called them last night to complain about my sites being down for the 3rd time in the day, they told me that they discovered that some of the databases had become corrupted, and they had to be deleted. When I asked if they had backups, they told me that the backups were corrupted as well (that is, they backed up the corrupted files, over the good files).

This made me realize just how important it is to provide myself a local backup of my data bases, just in case they happen to lose my data. I would hate to lose all of my blogs due to such a “bad luck” experience. I feel bad for the people who actually did lose their databases, because it means that they lost all the information from their blogs, and will have to start over!

So, I found a great plugin that will allow you to backup your WordPress blogs. You can find it by clicking here. Not only can you download the plugin, but you can find all the instructions for installing and using the plugin. But, don’t worry, it isn’t difficult. I am setting all of my blogs up to send me a back up by email every day. That way, I will never lose more than one day of data, which means only one or two posts on any given day.

If you don’t have a way to secure a local backup of your blog databases, make sure and get it set up. You cannot really rely on any web host to protect your data, as they can have the same problems as you and I can have. If they crash their servers, and their backups get corrupted, then you lose everything! So, just in case, backup your data locally, and then make sure to back up your backup! Call it overcautious, but it is better to be safe than sorry!

Here is one plugin that you should install if you are blogging on the WordPress platform. The Nofollow-free plugin turns off the default settings in WordPress that makes all links in the comments section of the blog “No Follow”. Most blog writers who are networking are trying to accomplish three things:

1. They want to check out other blogs, and learn as much as possible about their topics, niche or design.
2. They want to draw attention to their own blogs by leaving comments, with links, on other blogs that others can follow to their blogs.
3. They want to build their page rank by developing more links to their sites.

Unfortunately, on most blogs, this last objective is not met because all links are “No Follow” by default. If you install this plugin, you can allow those who comment on your blog to get those valuable back links. Of course, you will still want to keep an eye on all the comments, and not allow useless comments just for the links. Most bloggers will only comment when they think they have something valuable to say, so this is not usually a problem. However, it does become a problem, you can always delete inappropriate, or gratuitous comments through your control panel.

This plugin also has a lot of user control built in. You can define how many comments a user has to leave before the “no follow” tags are removed. The default is 5, but you can change that to anything you want. You can also control whether links put into the comment itself are “no follow” or not. Personally, I have this blog set so that all links attached to the name of the commenter is “no follow free”, but links placed in the comment itself will remain “no follow”. My thinking is that I want to encourage comments, but I don’t want people trying to put in a whole list of websites just to get links back to their sites.

You can download the Nofollow-free plugin by clicking here. If you need help getting the plugin installed or configured, visit the Nofollow-free plugin page.