Last week, I talked about what a great application WordPress is for the solo professional or small business owner. It’s easier than ever before to create a professional web site with just WordPress and a few handy tools. (Of course if you really want a site that knocks their socks off, it would be money well spent to hire a web designer to create a professional design and pull all the pieces together for you!)

Whether you roll up your sleeves and do it yourself or hire someone to do it for you, you should think about employing at least these five plugins to help drive traffic to your site, to add functionality to your site or to otherwise enhance it so that the visitor’s experience is the best. If visitors to your site don’t like what they see, or if the information they seek is not easily attainable (read: no more than two mouse clicks away), they won’t stay. And what’s worse, they won’t return.

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WordPress took the blogging world by storm just three years ago. The Movable Type licensing fiasco helped boost the then-fledgling CMS/blogging app’s popularity. And it’s held its ground, and in fact, overtaken MT as the premier blogging application. So .. WP is not just for blogs anymore. And I’ve chosen ten non-blog sites driven by WordPress to illustrate just how powerful this CMS can be. With plugin development continuing at its usual breakneck pace, you can be assured of useful and practical plugins to meet the needs of most small business owners and professionals who seek an easy way to create and update web content, and not just maintain a business blog.

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Upgrades for WordPress 2.0.10 (latest pre-Ella version) and WordPress 2.1.3 (latest Ella version) have been released and you should grab them here. WordPress notifies you of updates available via the RSS feed on your WP dashboard. You should develop the habit of applying those upgrades as soon as they are available to keep internet nasties at bay and to improve functionality. (Most upgrades are bug fixes, but quite a few of them patch security holes and those are the ones you definitely want to have.)

Once you’ve upgraded a few times, you’ll find you can do it in your sleep. So, what are you waiting for. Let’s upgrade that WordPress site!

1 BACKUP YOUR MYSQL DATABASE. This can be done either via the WP Backup utility (plugin) in the WP Dashboard or via PHPMyAdmin. (This is not a necessary step; I’ve NEVER had database failure during an upgrade, but I’d do this if I were working on your site just as a matter of good business practice: It’s not nice nor is it good for my reputation to blow up client sites!)

2 Make copies of any files you’ve customized. Most folks have just customized their themes, so you shouldn’t have anything to worry about there. If you’ve customized a plugin, be sure to FTP it to your hard drive or otherwise make a copy of it (rename it on the server, for example, unless it is in a file that is destined to be nuked later in this procedure such as wp-admin or wp-includes).

3 Login to your blog and disable ALL plugins.

4 FTP into your site and delete the following:

• All *.php files in the WP root EXCEPT .htaccess and wp-config.php, OR ANY CUSTOMIZED OR RENAMED FILES (see Item 2 above).
• /wp-includes folder/directory
• /wp-admin folder/directory

5 Download the latest upgrade distro from the WordPress site here: http://wordpress.org/download/

6 Unzip the contents of the distro file.

7 FTP to your site and upload the folder contents to your site. (Be careful not to upload any .htaccess or wp-config.php files because you don’t want to overwrite what’s already there.

8 Login to your WordPress blog and point your browser to upgrade.php, in the wp-admin folder/directory (example follows):
http://www.yourcooldomain.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php

9 Follow the steps there and the upgrade is complete.

10 Next, go to your Plugins page and reactivate each plugin ONE AT A TIME, checking your site after each activation. If there is a plugin that breaks the site or you are confronted with a blank page after its activation, this usually means that plugin is not compatible with this latest version of WordPress. At this point you have two options: Disable the plugin and find a compatible plugin with the same or similar functionality, or contact that plugin’s author/developer to see if a newer version of the plugin is in the works. Check the WordPress site for a comprehensive list of WP 2.0.x compatible plugins.

Pixelita Designs can perform script installation and upgrades for you for a nominal fee. We check to make sure your existing plugins work with the latest version of WordPress (or any other popular blogging application) and if they don’t, we can make recommendations for alternate plugins or an alternate upgrade path, depending on how strongly you feel about keeping a particular plugin. Contact us for details!