Ftp from your computer on upgrade, plugins, themes etc.

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KBleivik
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Ftp from your computer on upgrade, plugins, themes etc.

Post by KBleivik »

Our experience with WordPress so far is:
  1. Some themes have no 404 error page. We had to make it ourself.
  2. We host WordPress on a shared web server. That means that there may be timeouts and lost connection during an upgrade or a plugin deletion. We have found it best to upgrade via Ftp (in DreamWeaver). We don't upgrade via the WP DashBoard. That gives us stronger control over the upgrade process. For additional information see: http://codex.wordpress.org/Updating_WordPress
  3. One plugin corrupted our whole site. Since we had the WP broken link plugin enabled, it was fast to find the reason and we nearly immediately guessed which plugin it was. It was in fact the first we deleted, but the blog was corrupted for some minutes. So test that your blog / site functions seamless after an upgrade or after the activation of a new or upgraded plugin. Activate one plugin at a time and don't bulk activate them as we once did.
  4. Another plugin had so many images that we simply deleted it via the remote view in Dreamweaver and not the file manager in the cPanel. That took minutes.
  5. So we highly reccomend that you set up a development / test server on your own computer as explained in this http://www.oopschool.com/phpBB3/viewtop ... f=18&t=177 thread.
  6. Be aware that there can still be inconsistencies between your test sever on your computer and the production server on the web. A simple reason may be that different versions of php and MySQL are used on the two servers and they can be configured differently. So a plugin that requires a newer version of php may function on your test, but not on your production server. An example that you should note for WordPress 3.2 expected June 30. 2011 (our bolding):
    To run WordPress your host just needs a couple of things:

    PHP version 5.2.4 or greater
    MySQL version 5.0 or greater

    The requirements have changed as of WordPress 3.2. The minimum requirements for WordPress 3.1 are PHP 4.3 and MySQL 4.1.2.
    Source: http://wordpress.org/about/requirements/
  7. So before you do big changes, take backups as explained here: http://www.oopschool.com/phpBB3/viewtop ... f=18&t=190
  8. Ideally you should be able to recreate your blog from an sql database file and the files on your computer in less than one to two hours unless your blog is very big or you are on a very slow internet connection.
  9. If you delete one ore more posts by accident, note that if you click the posts link in the upper left corner of the dash board, there is a trash can link from where you can recreate the post unless you deleted it permanently.
  10. In sum, choose your plugins and themes carefully and upgrade via ftp from you computer if possible. That also guarantees that you have the same files on your computer and your web server and your blog is not down while upgrading a plugin that can hang on e.g. a shared server. Once the updated version is uploaded to your server you only reactivate the plugin without any downtime for your site. Themes etc. can be modified from the control panel in the WP dashboard. One example, sidebar.php. For the same reason, we have found it faster more efficient and with a more clear code and design view doing that from the file system on our computer and then ftp the modified files to the development server.

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