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Finally I took the plunge and upgraded WordPress. I’ve heard so many different things – negative and positive, but decided it’s now or never. Upgrading went well – largely due to WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin courtesy of Techie Buzz, upgrading WP is a cinch using this plugin and takes no more than a few minutes, which includes dbase backups, deactivating plugins and WP upgrade.

So far so good. Upgrade done – check. Now it’s time to reactivate plugins, which you have to do one by one. Sad to say that 60% of them were no longer compatible with the newly installed WP version – including the theme I was using that looked a real mess after the upgrade. So what should have been a 15 minute job turned into a really long night behind the computer. But OK – it’s all experience at least that’s what I was saying to myself to keep calm.

At times like these you really don’t want your visitors to see you’re messing about with the site, so it’s good to be able to put the blog on standby and out of sight. Maintenance Mode is a great plugin to take care of this.

As it turns out I needn’t have worried about updating all the plugins – enter Single Click WordPress Plugin Updater. Where have you been all my WP life! Needless to say this little plugin beauty saved me from burning unnecessary midnight oil.

If you’ve already upgraded – you’ll know that the admin back office interface doesn’t fill the screen, well only about half of the screen. So already 15 minutes into the upgrade I was kicking myself for upgrading. This interface was not what I wanted to be greeted with at each login – all that white space glaring back at me and not being used for anything. It didn’t take me long to find Remove Max Width which is just the plugin you need to solve this problem.

Next up was Popularity Contest that I use on all my WP blogs to help me gauge interest on my content. Woe is me this plugin turned out to be non compatible with the latest version of WP. Luckily a smart techie has patched this plugin so it works just great with the new version of WP.

On to the admin back-office menus in the upgraded version of WordPress. Not very attractive or organized well – all over the place. Lighter Menu’s solved this problem very nicely and reorganized everything making each menu easy to find and much easier on the eye too.

I’ve always found it a little annoying after logging in, making changes, checking the front-end of the site and then having to type in …wp-admin in the status bar or clicking back each time. WordPress Admin Bar takes care of this very nicely as it creates an admin bar at the top of your site for logged in users, so you have quick access back to the admin area.

I often look for handy plugins to make my blogging life easier. PluginInstaller saves a lot of time as it eliminates the need to download a plugin archive, upload it to your FTP server and unpack it manually. With PlugInstaller, you can easily enter a plugin URL (e.g. directly from a plugin repository website – for example at WordPress, where you’ll find many plugins to make your blogging life easier.

On other sites we use Openads for serving various ads – I think it’s called OpenX these days, but it’s big for our use, which is basically ad rotation, so I was pleased to find Ad-Minister. This is a plugin that adds a user friendly ads management system, which supports ad-rotation, scheduling and is fully widget compatible.

There appears to be mixed feelings about upgrading to the new version of WordPress. What I thought was going to be an ordeal turned into a positive experience and I wont have any worries about upgrading next time either. Which brings me to the last plugin I’ll mention today and that is – the WordPress Backup plugin that creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database. Invaluable plugin – that can get you out of a very tight spot.

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