I am a: Quirky sysadmin. Geek. Gamer. Comic fangirl. My little space, my home on the interwebs. I blog about personal stuffs, work, various coding projects, and anything else I feel like.

I had a chance this afternoon to sit and play around with the WordPress Automatic Upgrade (WPAU) plugin. I decided to upgrade my other problem-child second most troublesome blog, my recipe site (Now We’re Cookin’).

Overall, WPAU is impressive. It automates some of the most tedious parts of the upgrade process and I think it would be a very handy tool to recommend to those who aren’t as comfortable mucking around in WordPress’ inner guts.

I took a myriad of screenshots and uploaded them to my Zooomr account here.

Backing up

I haven’t had a chance to dump the backup files into a test site, but did take a peek to see how thorough the backup process was/is. The database backup looked pretty thorough, and prior to WPAU running the backup, you are given the option to backup just the tables necessary to WordPress or any (or all) of the accompanying tables (from plugins, bbPress, etc.). In the file backups however, I saw one thing that concerns me a little. The wp-content directory is skipped entirely. Anyone who’s upgraded a few times knows that you almost never overwrite anything in this directory. That said, I would always recommend backing it up just for shits and giggles.

Experience has taught me never to assume that my existing backups have everything in them.

I did notice that the entire root was backed up, not just the WordPress files, so that’s a good thing. I can’t tell you how many people I know who’ve accidentally deleted files that were critical to their site (outside of WP obviously) because they weren’t paying attention!

My personal gripes

I was under the impression that WPAU would keep any existing customized WordPress files and update if needed. On this particular site, I use a very customized quicktags.js. Granted, I have a million copies of these and it’s no big deal to just throw in a backup to overwrite the one that was installed in the upgrade process. But still … shouldn’t it have kept my customized file?

Also, and this is just my personal pet peevery, it copied the license.txt and readme.html into the site’s root directory. Personally, when I’m snooping around a site, those are two of the first 10 or so files/filetypes I would look for…

Not a big deal, like I said, just my personal peeve …

Last but not least, I didn’t see any changes to the wp-config.php file. Granted, I had already updated it prior to the upgrade, so maybe the app recognized that … I don’t know. However, that is something that concerns me considering that there have been several significant changes in the WP-Config during the last 2-3 version releases.

In closing

Like I said before, I like WPAU overall. I think it will come in very handy for several people I know, and I will most likely use it on my “non-custom” sites. That said, I think I would still feel more comfortable handling my more “customized” sites by hand.

A big thanks should go out to Keith Dsouza, the author of WordPress Automatic Upgrade. That’s a very highly complicated plugin — much more detailed and elaborate than any of my own hack-jobs!