Keith Dsouza has made a superb Wordpress plugin that ‘automatically’ upgrades your Wordpress blog software when they’ve released an update. Wordpress is constantly enhancing their product, and due to it’s global popularity they are forced to constantly enhance the security of the code base, both of which mean they update the code base 4-8 times a year.

I’ve been trying to use Keith’s Wordpress Automatic Upgrade (WPAU) plugin and had some deployment issues I had to work out I thought I’d share.

1. If you download the .zips of your backup to your home computer, both Apple and Win, very reasonably, do not display files that begin with a period. While I’m normally cognizant of this, for a couple tests I thought the backup downloads were empty because Dreamhosts, my web host, uses a common file structure that has a .name pattern for the root. And you gotta make sure your backups are what you expect them to be so make sure you view those files before proceeding with the upgrade.

   I’ve now added the following two aliases to my .bash_profile so I can easily toggle between the display of .files and hiding them so I can quickly and confidently save off these backups.

   alias showdot=’ defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE; killall Finder’

   alias nodot=’ defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE; killall Finder’
   

2. WPAU does not (I believe) include your webroot’s .htaccess file in it’s backup. If you’ve never touched or edited a .htaccess file then you don’t need to worry about it. But I found plenty of reasons tweak them for my wordpress blogs and each WordPress update always overwrites them. *Very annoying* and to my chagrin WPAU does not include the .htaccess in the backup. So for now I back it off manually before I begin the backup process.
3. Don’t forget to go back and complete the last WPAU update steps even after you’ve been directed to open a new window and confirm the blog has been updated. If you don’t finish the steps, you’ll need to manually re-activate your plugins as they will still be deactivated.