Upgrade of WordPress blog to version 3.0

I have now upgraded WordPress to version 3.0.
Wordpress provides the website and blog on Watkissonline, as well as uploading posts to the First Aid Quiz and Penguin Tutor web site. See: Website powered by WordPress.

Version 3.0 provides numerous new features providing more CMS features, as well as multi-site blogging.

I use my own custom theme so there is no visible difference to visitors of the site. So far I have not tried any of the new features as I am using my own custom scripts to provide some of that functionality already, but I’ll be taking at look at whether it is better to run my sites directly as a multi-site wordpress site rather than using the scripts.

The upgrade was fairly straight forward. It took about 30 minutes to upload the new files. During an upgrade of WordPress there is a good chance that visitors will get an unsightly error message, so during the upgrade I took the site offline by using a .htaccess rewrite (more about that in a future post). Once the new files were uploaded it was a single click on the “Upgrade” button in the Dashboard and the new site was up and running.
There is also an automated online upgrade option, but as this was a large version number upgrade I performed the steps manually so that I could monitor the progress more closely (WordPress automatic upgrade, but no status indication).

Find out more about WordPress 3.0 in the following video.