A new version of Wordpress, the awesome blogging software used to power this very blog (and millions more out there, as well) is out!. It's actually just a bug-fix release, but it's still news, isn't it? This will be a quickie post, just to let you people know how things have gone with this upgrade.
To tell you the truth, I didn't think it would be so easy upgrading this software. But it's basically all in one step, if you don't count backing up your data. This is very important whenever you do a software upgrade. All I did was back up my original Wordpress installation folder on the hosting server, and backed up the MySQL database as well. I won't go into specifics, as I don't want to make this post too technical. Also, as a precaution, please de-activate all of your currently activated plugins. This is not necessary, but it's nice to do this, just in case one of your plugins is incompatible with the current version of Wordpress, possibly breaking your installation.
Afterwards, I downloaded the new Wordpress release, decompressed it, and copied over my old installation directory. Then, all you need to do it go to a special upgrade page in your site (http://your.domain.com/wordpress/wp-admin/upgrade.php, where http://your.domain.com is your domain name (obviously) and http://your.domain.com/wordpress is the main page of your blog. A screen will appear, asking you if you want to go into the upgrade process. Click on the 'Upgrade' link, and that's it! I thought it would be a long, drawn-out process, but it wasn't. You canj then visit your shiny-new blog! Actually, it's not that shiny, since it'll be basically the same. But I'm sure you'll feel comfortable knowing your blog is running the latest software,, with (hopefully) less bugs and insecurities as before, right?
All of these instructions can be found at the Wordpress website. So why did I bother to post this? I guess I wanted to let you all know that this is an easy upgrade, and that I'm up-to-date!
Edit: Seems like a hacker got into the previous Wordpress release, and modified some files to allow remote code execution. Just in case, if you have Wordpress 2.1.1 installed in your site, there are chances that you have one of these "infected" releases, and should seriously upgrade to Wordpress 2.1.2 now.