Wordpress 2.7 RC1 is Available

Last Updated on Monday, 12 January 2009 09:45 Written by webguyatwork Thursday, 4 December 2008 04:10

Thanks to a quick-posting Rachel Baker (twitter.com/rachelbaker), I was alerted to an upcoming upgrade to Wordpress 2.7 that is being pushed to users of their blog site tonight at 5pm PST.  Unfortunately, the personally hosted version is not slated for availability for another month, the release candidate 1 is available for download now at http://wordpress.org/development/2008/12/wordpress-27-release-candidate-1/.

The upgrade took me only minutes to perform.  Try it out for yourself (offline first, of course):

1. Backup your database
If you aren’t sure how to do this, check out the well documented tutorial on the Wordpress site: http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Backups.  No sense in retyping what they’ve done a beautiful job of posting.

2. Backup up your wordpress directory
I made a copy of the wordpress folder just in case I needed anything out of it.  This way, I won’t lose any of my custom widgets that I’ve installed.

3. Extract the 2.7 compressed archive
Extract the files from your download into the existing wordpress folder.  Overwrite all files when asked to do so.  *** I didn’t have any issues with configurations afterward, so I don’t know if it’s necessary to copy back any config files.  I didn’t have to do so.

4. Log into your blog and upgrade the database
A simple database upgrade process will need to be run to get you up to the 2.7 level.  A one-button interface is made available to make things easier.

Wordpress 2.7 - Database Upgrade

When your upgrade is complete, go check out the newly enhanced administrative interface.  It looks a 100 times better than before with simpler navigation through a new sidebar menu.  While you’re at it, take a look at how they came up with the new icons through a design contest: http://wordpress.org/development/2008/11/the-results-of-project-icon/.