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WordPress 2.5 was just released on March 29, 2008. These are the original statements from its WordPress Blog, “The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.” To learn more about these features, visit What is New In WordPress 2.5? The article WordPress Upgrade Preparation Checklist also provides you more detail information of what you should look out for before upgrading to WordPress 2.5. It will be worth of your time.

I just upgraded WordPress 2.3.3 to WordPress 2.5 yesterday. Everything went smoothly. If you consider to upgrade your existing version to WordPress 2.5, the first thing is to find out you meet the minimum requirement. Create a file named checkphpNmysql.php or any name you want and put the following code in that file and save it:

<?phpinfo();?>

Second upload that file to your public_html directory, and run it as http://www.yoursitename.com/checkphpNmysql.php in your browser to find out your PHP version and MySQL version right away. Make sure you replace yoursitename with your own domain name. If you do fulfill the minimum requirement, then download WordPress 2.5 here. The following steps for upgrading to WordPress 2.5 are pretty straightforward:

1. Back up your database. Here are the instructions showing you how to do that
2. Back up ALL of your files in your WordPress directory to your PC (personal computer)
3. Check your backups to make sure they are usable
4. Deactivate All your plugins
5. Unzipped wordpress-2.5 file you just downloaded
6. Delete the old WordPress files except wp-config.php file, wp-content folder, wp-images folder (only older installations from 1.5.x days will have this folder), wp-includes/languages/ folder (if you are using a language file, do not delete this folder), .htaccess file (if you have added custom rules to your .htaccess, do not delete it), and Custom Content and/or Plugins (if you have any images or other Custom Content or Plugins inside the wp-content folder, do NOT delete them)
7. Upload your unzipped wordpress-2.5 files to your WordPress directory
8. Run http://www.yoursitename.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php in your browser (Replace yoursitename with your own domain name)
9. Reactivate those plugins that you deactivated earlier

That is it. Now go ahead and explore your new WordPress 2.5 interface. Get familiar with it.

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