NOT a Guru!
Keeping it simple, without the hype. PC tips and Internet advice for mom and pop businesses.
Keeping it simple, without the hype. PC tips and Internet advice for mom and pop businesses.
In today’s post, you’ll see how to easily update your Wordpress installation that is based on Jeff Johnson’s SEO blog, which is free software that will supercharge your site’s traffic and indexing. These tutorials are written for mom and pop business owners or other first-time web designers who have never had a website before.
The very first thing you want to do is to log into your blog. It will always be at http://www.YourDomain.com/[blog-subfolder]/wp-admin.php. The subfolder is optional.
Once you log in, you are taken to what is called a “Dashboard.” After you have installed Jeff’s blog software, there are two things that you will notice straight away:
- A new version of WordPress is available. IGNORE THIS RIGHT NOW. We’re going to activate the automatic plugin that you installed (see yesterday’s post) so that you can preserve the software content.
- There’s a red alert for plugins. These plugins need to be updated.
To update your plugins, click “Plugins” and you will be taken to the page where all of them are listed.
There are two type of plugins: Active plugins and inactive plugins.
One of the nice things about recent upgrades to Wordpress is that it will automatically upgrade your plugins. You’ll see a link, upgrade automatically. In your first step, you will want to automatically upgrade your currently active plugins.
To upgrade, you’ll need to click the “upgrade automatically” for each individual active plugin. When you start out, the blog software will ask for your FTP connection information, as shown.
You will see that by default, the software lists your username and password that is stored in your cookies to administer the blog. You need to change this information. It needs to be the username and password that you use to access your control panel and access the server via FTP. Click the “remember me” or any other automatic password storage alerts that show up in your browser. That way, you won’t need to keep entering your information over and over again.
Once you have the correct file transfer protocol information, click the proceed button and the software goes to work. As you can see below, you get a confirmation that your plugin has been upgraded. Click your “plugins” link and go through each “currently active plugin,” activating where required.
A couple of the automatic plugin updates may be unsuccessful, as shown in the image below.
When this happens, don’t worry about it. It is because the current version of Wordpress that your blog is running on is incompatible with the plugin update. By default, the plugin will move into the “Inactive Plugins” in the 2nd half of your plugin page.
In the inactive plugins section, you can update your plugins and activate them. We’ll take a look at Akismet, which is an important plugin for spam comments.
First, automatically update the plugin as you did with the “currently active plugins.”
The next thing you want to do is to activate the plugin by clicking “activate.” The plugin will not work unless you enter a WordPress API key.
To get your key, click the “enter your WordPress.com API key” link and you will see the Akismet Configuration blurb below. Click the “Get your key” link as shown.
You wll be taken to the WordPress.com website, where you need to sign up. You will have an option to get a WordPress blog and/or an account. Your login information will be sent to you by email. Once you have confirmed your login information, you will get a second email with your API key. You will need to copy and paste that key into the Akismet plugin screen (shown above) and click the Update options.
After you have activated and, where you are able to do so, updated the plugins, you should see at the top of your screen the following:
You want the first line that reads “Click Here to Automatically Upgrade WordPress to latest Version.” If you did not install the Wordpress automatic upgrade plugin (discussed yesterday) or activated it, the first link in the above image will not show. When you click the automatic upgrade option, the system will run a preliminary test and then you will need to type in your FTP information, which is the same as what you use to access your control panel and to access your server via FTP. One thing that you need to take note of is to include the proper location of your blog. In Laura’s example, we have included the subfolder, WeightJournal, as shown in the image. If you don’t include the correct information, you may have trouble with your blog.
Once you click “Let’s Go,” the automatic upgrade will install all upgrades to WordPress. Follow the prompts all the way along. You will have a file backup and database backup along the way. I highly recommend that you save these backups to a place on your hard drive that you can find. When the upgrade is done, click the “clean up the files” option.
Once the files are cleaned up, you’re ready to go! Double check your plugins page to make sure all of the plugins are updated and active.
We’ll take a look at installing custom templates and posting to your blog later. This is because Jeff’s SEO blog software is so powerful that it will suck in web traffic before the site is done!
From here on out, whenever you need to update your Wordpress blog installation or plugins, you can do it automatically! This is a wonderful feature that does not require any programming knowledge.
NOTE: If you installed the SEO blog software per Jeff’s videos, you might want to install the WordPress automatic upgrade plugin like we did yesterday. This will make all future updates easy.
~~~ Quick Navigation ~~~
Yesterday: How to FTP; How to Install the SEO Blog / Wordpress Software and Additional Plugins.
Tomorrow: Creating an HTML Template.
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