The fastest guide on how to upgrade your personal WordPress blog

When you see the message: “Worpdress 2.x is available! Please update now” you shouldn’t be lazy and skip the updating because you never know if someone could exploit vulnerabilities of the previous versions of WordPress. Another good reason not to skip the updating process is that WordPress is allways improving and adding new features which can speed up your blogging.

Here is the simplest way to update your WordPress blog to the latest version.
Step1. Download newest WordPress version from WordPress.org and extract it on your local machine
Step2. You need to delete and reupload wp-admin and wp-includes folders into your WordPress blog installation directory. If you use some FTP program (for example SmartFTP) you can drag and drop those folders directly on the screen and choose merge in the pop up window. This is the same as you would try to copy folder named A to a folder named B which already has a folder named A. So a merge operation will not delete everything from the existing folder but just adds new files and asks what to do if the are files with the same names already.
Choose merge

Choose merge

 In the notification window choose copy and replace files.

Choose copy and replace

Choose copy and replace

Step3. Do the same with folders wp-admin and wp-includes and also replace all files in the main directory (from index.php to xmlrpc.php). You shouldn’t worry about affecting your configuration file wp-config.php because it has the additional line “sample” in the original WP files.
Step4. Login to your wordpress account and you should see a notification that you have to update the database. Just press the button and after several seconds everything will be fixed.
Final notes. As you just saw, updating WordPress blog is just as simple as replacing old files with new ones and clicking few buttons.
As I said new Worpdress releases come with usefull improvements. One of them in the WP 2.6 version is Turbo button. This enables Google Gears to speed up your blogging.
Additional new features include Press this button which allows you to put various content from internet pages (video, audio, pictures) in your blog posts with just a single press of a button.

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