I’ve been trying to keep up with the WordPress 2.8.x releases. There’s even a handy feature in the admin panel telling you that an update has been released, and you need to upgrade. The 2.8.4 upgrade fixes a large security hole in WordPress, so I figured I shouldn’t wait to apply the fix.

Sadly, the built in ‘Automatic Upgrade’ fails to do, well, anything. It tells me that it’s “Downloading the file: wordpress-2.8.x.zip” but never makes any progress. The fix, from the developers? Use the manual process. It works, and it’s not too much trouble, but I really would like the feature (which has never failed me for a plugin upgrade, by the way) to work properly for major releases. I’ve had to do this 4 times now, and I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve written a backup script just to handle the tedious task of backing up the database and wordpress directories. It’s attached to this post. Comments or questions, please let me know. Open source, GPL, yadda yadda yadda.

wordpress.backup.sh