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I’ve been giving the following list of resources to clients and students over the years, to help aid in their learning goals. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it’s a good start. I’ll update this post whenever I come across good resources.

Full disclosure: All of these books listed, except Digging Into WordPress, lead to Amazon.com. None of the Amazon.com links are affiliate links, so I don’t benefit from purchases made through them. I am an affiliate for the Digging Into WordPress book, and I earn a commission from purchases made through the link below.

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Eventually, we all have to upgrade most tech things, but some of us (and by “us” I mean me) aren’t early adopters of things. A not so well known fact about me is that I was still happily using Photoshop 7 until mid-2008, when I finally upgraded to CS3. Why? Because Photoshop 7 worked, and I saw no reason to upgrade. WordPress is not Photoshop.

And, on a completely unrelated note, I like the word kerfuffle.

Have you logged in to WordPress lately and been greeted with a notice to upgrade to the latest version?

If you have, it means it’s time to upgrade. Before you click on that “please update now” link, stop! There are a few important steps to follow to help minimize any potential problems. I’m all for taking risks from time to time, but not where my entire website or blog is concerned.

I’ve updated this post to include a screencast walk-through of updating WP, because the visual works for some folks, and the written works for others.

Step 1:
Back up your database. There are a couple of ways to back things up. You can either use the export option found under Tools, or you can use a database backup plugin like WP-DB-Backup or WP-DBManager. Whether you’re upgrading or not, you should backup your database on a regular basis

Step 2:
Deactivate all your plugins. Yup, all of them.

Step 3:
Now, click the please update now link.

If everything goes smoothly, reactivate all your plugins and carry on.

If things don’t go smoothly during the upgrade, don’t panic. Take a deep, cleansing breath: inhale, pink… exhale, blue (or exhale primal scream if need be), and perform the upgrade manually. The good folks at WordPress.org have a handy guide for that.

Now, if the upgrade goes smoothly, but there seem to be problems after reactivating your plugins, again don’t panic. Take another deep, cleansing breath and deactivate all your plugins again. After that, reactivate them one by one. When the problems show up again, it’s more than likely the last plugin you reactivated. Check to see if there’s an update for that plugin. If there is, update it. If not, deactivate the plugin. Even if you update the plugin, there could still be conflicts with other plugins, so you may have to do some deactivating and reactivating of plugins in pairs to determine if there are some that don’t play nicely with each other.

WordPress incremental releases, e.g. 2.8.5 to 2.8.6, are usually security releases, so it’s a good idea to stay on top of those. Keep your plugins updated as well. Major releases like 2.8.6 to 2.9 are not something I’d recommend jumping into right away. I’d recommend giving it about a month to allow for bugs and glitches to be found and resolved.

Last week I attended a Biznik WordPress Chatter event hosted by Bob Dunn. One of the questions thrown out to the group was about must-have plugins. If you’re using WordPress, you’ve probably noticed there are seemingly endless amounts of plugins to do a wide variety of things from pulling in your Twitter feed to backing up your WP database (a REALLY good idea to do regularly) to making your coffee in the morning. Okay, there is no plugin to make you coffee, but you get the idea.

Here’s a short list of what I think would be necessary and very helpful plugins to have. Not every user needs every plugin, and you don’t want to go full tilt boogie installing plugins just because you can. Install only what you need, keep up with any updates made to them, be very mindful about updating your general WP installation and how that relates to any installed plugins (deactivate your plugins BEFORE updating WP!), deactivate plugins not in use, and delete what you don’t need. In other words, keep it clean, yo!

The necessities:

• Akismet – This comes pre-installed, but you need to activate it. Activation requires acquiring a WordPress API key. Don’t share the key, it’s user-specific. If you’re developing WP sites for other people, they each need their own key.
• All in One SEO Pack – Optimizes your WP website/blog for robots, and gives you control over page titles, meta tags, etc. SEO is a hot-button topic, and my 2 cents is that first and foremost, your website/blog should be optimized for human beings, not robots. Feel free to argue amongst yourselves ;)
• Contact Form 7 – Allows you to create multiple contact forms, complete with CAPTCHA.
• Google Analytics – Track visitors, where they come from, links, downloads, and AdSense clicks.
• Google XML Sitemaps – Creates a Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask-compliant XML sitemap that updates itself every time you create a new page or post.
• Login Lockdown – Logs all failed login attempts to your WP admin area, and can be configured to block IP addresses if a certain number of failed attempts happen in a specified period of time.
• WordPress Database Backup – You REALLY need to backup your database frequently, especially if you’re prolific. If you’re cranking out the posts on a daily basis, back that thang up weekly. If you’re posting infrequently, back it up every couple of weeks or monthly, but do it. This nifty-swell plugin will email you a copy of your database, which you should tuck away in a safe place. Please, please, please, DO NOT store your database backup on your server, it’s just asking for trouble.
• WordPress DBManager – For more control over your WP database, including repairing and restoring, running queries, as well as creating backups, this plugin is the one to install.

Stream your life:

• Flickpress – Pull in a designated number of photos from your Flickr account. Super easy to configure, and has a bit of flexibility with thumbnail layout and arrangement.
• Reliable Twitter – Your tweets, now on your blog/website! If your sidebar is widgetized, adding your Twitter feed is as simple as drag and drop.

While I’ve provided links to each of these plugins, it more efficient to search for, and install them within your WP installation.