Upgrading to WordPress 2.3.3 (waaay updated)

New WordPress Out Again!! And for the life of me, even if I’ve been webmastering in the wonderful of WordPress for years now, I still don’t enjoy the process of upgrading, unassuaged* by the fact I have to do it 3 times every time (I have 3 blogs, not including this).

At any rate, further investigation (highly recommended everytime a new release of anything – drupal, phpbb, etc., comes out), has shown an easier way.

It’s all, as always, on the WP Blog. Apparently most of the hullabaloo has to do with, to quote, an “XML-RPC implementation such that a specially crafted request would allow a user to edit posts of other users on that blog“, assuming you allow registration. Ergo, merely replacing the xmlprc.php file will suffice! Here’s the link to that.

Like most open source software, WordPress updates by increments and releases pending the severity of the issue. Hence, investigating the reason for the upgrade is important. In this case, I only allow registration on one of my blogs, so this upgrade is waay important to that one but not so much to the others.

There are 3 other less serious upgrades, listed here. Ticket 3780 has to do with a gettext issue on 64bit systems using php5.2.1. I’m neither using a 64bit system nor php5.2.1 (i’m using 5.2.5). Ticket 5273 has to do with a registration email callout issue, and Ticket 5090 deals with a mysql table call from config.php, an issue on a plugin I’ve never heard of.

So all’s well as long as I deal with the xmlrpc file. Yes, I know what I’m doing. I think.

UPDATE!!

Ok so it turns out the above-mentioned announcement post at the WP-Blog was waaay incomplete. As per the WordPress’ own Forum Announcement, there are five files that have been changed, namely:

wp-includes/version.php
wp-includes/pluggable.php
wp-includes/gettext.php
wp-admin/install-helper.php

as well as the file I mentioned above:

xmlrpc.php

And so because I’m feeling up to it after a day’s rest (got sick yesterday), here’s a quick picture guide to replacing these files.

First, here’s how it looks when WordPress says your files need updating:

ballex_need_updating1.gifView from WordPress’ Dashboard

Here’s how these files look after I downloaded and unzipped them on my Desktop from WordPress.org:

includes.gif
/wp-includes
admin.gif
/wp-admin
root.gif
root wordpress folder

I use the FileZilla FTP Client, but you can use any.

filezilla.gif
Just drag from the left to right.

Upon discovering that there are already similarly named files existing in the same directory, all FTP programs will ask if you want to overwrite them. In this case, we’re saying yes because we’ve got backups. But if you don’t have a backup, you can rename the files about to be written over to another name (ex. xmlrpc.php-bak). That way if you screw things up, you can just delete the new file, rename the old file to its orig name and you should be back from where you started.

Here’s how it looks all updated:

ballex_fixed.gif
Voila!

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