How to upgrade a WordPress theme (The Easy Way)

As you know WordPress is my favorite Dynamic website software because of it’s ease of use, it’s flexibility, support and plug-ins. For someone starting out with WordPress you might feel a little over whelmed. I will show you how to update themes the easy way and the “longer” way. *NOTE * Keep in mind if you did any sort of customization to a theme you will most likely have to re-apply it if you want the upgraded version.

Some theme authors allow for “automatic” updates of your theme. This is the “easy way” of updating your theme as it takes very little user intervention.

1.) Go to your blog’s website. http://<domain_name>/wp-admin/

2.) Login into your account.

3.) Click on Appearance

4.) On the right side of the screen you will see info on the blog, what version it is at and if it can be updated.

5.) Click “upgrade automatically”.

6.) You will get a warning from WordPress about upgrading automatically. Read the warning. If you have made any customizations please document them so that if you want to re-apply them to the WordPress Theme after upgrading you can do so easily.

7.) It should complete automatically.

Depending on your host environment this will work flawlessly or not at all. Hosting the Blog myself and on GoDaddy – The best webpage hosting upgrading never failed. The first while of hosting my blog I used 000Webhost.com – Provides Crappy Service. They are a free hosting account. While I like the fact that they are free I found there server was up and down quite a bit. With 000Webhost I had to use wordpress’s FTP upload and I found that it was really hit or miss.

How to upgrade a WordPress Them the longer way

*NOTE * Backup all theme Directories first. Document any changes you made to the layout of theme.

The longer way would be to upload the theme is to:

1. FTP into your server using a FTP Client like Filezilla.
2. Go to \wp-content\themes\
3. Copy the updated theme overtop of your older theme.

Voila it is done.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 6:46 am and is filed under Wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.