WordPress Security is About More than WordPress

[JohnM]

May I ask what your experience is with upgrading ? Does the one-click-upgrade bork on many PHP4 servers compared to PHP5 servers ? In your experience, whats the reason why people dont upgrade, is it actual theme/plugin incompatibility or are they just afraid to do it ?

[andrea_r]

IME, people are afraid to upgrade. They don't know the inner workings of WP, so they think an upgrade will break "something" and chaos will ensue.

Which is fine, so that's when you either learn it or hire someone.

[WeFixWP.com]

We are pretty conservative when it comes to upgrading. We shudder at how many bloggers will blindly hit that Update button (and who could blame them, the upgrade message stares them in the face until it's done). Minimally, we recommend that users backup their databases (easily done via plugin) and even to get a backup of their WP files as well.

When it's a major WP release update (from 2.7 to 2.8, for example) we would encourage them to make a development server or clone of their site to perform upgrades "offline." Now that easy for us to say, we have the FTP & DB tools to do it quickly and easily - but we know that most people are not comfortable playing around on their servers.

There are many factors as to why people don't upgrade, they can be:
- fear of breaking their blogs (why touch what's working)
- not fully knowing if a plugin will work (if it's critical to the content display or a it is key feature that needs to be running, it's hard to change)
- themes, especially free or paid ones as opposed to custom, may have been coded up to a certain WP release (functions can get depreciated and the theme needs to use the newer code)
- host issues (some hosts don't support WP well and the users don't want to lose everything if something goes wrong)
- one-click doesn't work (some hosts don't allow it or requires more configuration to run properly)

We have run into many bobbles with the one-click upgrade (most are easy to overcome) but those error messages can be downright scary. It's never as easy as it seems, but since 2.8, it's been a lot nicer.