When to Upgrade WordPress, When to upgrade Plugin,

  • I’m not new to WP, but I am in this case. So I have a few brief questions I’ve never had to ask.

    I’m taking over a third party vendor who apparently did a lot with the code/plugin and added there own things in. They tell me they have to keep the site hosted where they are or it break the site. I’m essentially taking over SEO (Yoast), Google Analytics (which I had to start over and they used their own tool).

    My desire is to start over, but that is not a choice by the client.

    • Is there a rule of thumb as to when to update versions? (The vendor started with 3.7 and never updated anything – I typical update each time to avoid these kids of conflicts). I would have updated 3.8, 3.9, 4.0 etc …Or is there a good reason for never changing?
    • Is there a rule of thumb as to when to update plugins? Again, the vendor never updated so Yoast is significantly behind. Or is there a good reason for never changing?
    • Same question for themes such as Ultimatum?
    • I’m traditionally a Dreamweaver CS6 user and would like to know if anyone out there has successfully also used Dreamweaver to manage admin with WP?

    Your opinions and direction would be most helpful. I appreciate very much.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Thread Starter mbascue

    (@mbascue)

    By the way, the reason this is helpful because maybe I should leave it as is, or maybe I should upgrade. I realize this is personal opinion, but it would help me a lot, since someone may think of something I didn’t.

    Thanks

    I like to update everything WordPress, themes and plugins as soon as possible, since a lot of new releases has security fixes but if the vendor has added & edited code directly to the files then updating them will wipe all of that out – which will most likely remove features from the site.

    In which case, you’re sort of between a rock & a hard place, stuck between outdated or losing features the client requested.

    Could always take a backup, create the site and experiment what happens when you do update it – before doing it on the live site.

    Thread Starter mbascue

    (@mbascue)

    Exactly, this is what I was thinking. I appreciate your thoughts on it. I was hoping there might be another thought, but they are not willing to share what they did in updates and so on, so my client is pretty much at

    – Keep using us.

    – Don’t use us and if it breaks, it will be $120/hour to fix it. (which I keep hearing over and over).

    – My client has already been told, they have to keep paying for hosting because they cannot move the site (if they move it, it will surely break).

    – But the vendor, as I said will not share exactly what they did.

    So as you said, I’m thinking
    +Rebuild to exact same look and feel (I think you said that).
    +Backup, update and experiment see what I have and how much would actually change.

    Again, thank you for taking a listen and providing feedback.

    mb

    There’s not really any need to rebuild it. What I meant is take a backup of what is currently there and restore it to a new hosting package (with a totally irrelevant domain name), one you don’t use and just play with.

    There’s a few plugins on the market that’ll back it up for you to say dropbox. Then you can create a new WordPress installation on another hosting account, install the plugin and just restore the old site.

    You’ll need to go through into the Database and change the URLs, from the old to the new.

    But at least it’ll enable you to then make sure it’s properly replicated and then find out what does happen when you do switch host and update.

    Thread Starter mbascue

    (@mbascue)

    OK, cool! That rocks!

    Thanks!

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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