New WordPress plugin upgrade

Yes! I just upgraded to WordPress 2.5 from WordPress 2.2.2. Yeah I skipped all all the rest of the 2.3 plus plus upgrades while awaiting this major version. Immediately after upgrade, which went smoothly, I can see a huge difference, even to the layout of the whole Publisher dashboard. One major improvement which I just used, was upgrading plugins.

It used to be quite a pain to upgrade newer versions of plugins when one upgrade their WordPress. I have to go to the original plugins site, download the plugin file, open up Filezilla, upload the plugin to the plugin folder, and reactive it. How many steps are those? Well, no more probs now. When you go to the plugins page, immediately you can see which plugins are out of date.

For eg. in the picture above, my Similar Posts plugin was out of date, (even though I just installed it!). A notice will show,

There is a new version of Similar Posts available. Download Version 2.5b12 or upgrade automatically.

Upgrade automatically? I clicked on that, I like automatic stuffs.
This then brings you to a page to key in your FTP details.

In this case, you gotta be hosting your site yourself, and not on WordPress.com. Just grab your username and password, key it in, and click on Proceed. Just in a second, a new screen appears showing that your update is done and successful.

Voila! How much simple can it get? I’m loving WordPress 2.5 at the moment. Let’s see what other magic stuff it can do.