I think that one of the major headaches of using a blogging platform to run your online empire, is the blasted time spent on upgrading the core files (if you use Wordpress, that’s generally 3 or 4 times plus, per year) and the various plugins.
CORE UPDATES are not hard to do when you run a few blogs, but it gets tiresome when you are updating five, ten, twenty, or a hundred blogs. Even if you do use the ‘automatic’ upgrade feature, that’s still a lot of logging in, then clicking, then waiting for it to all finish. AND then hope, that it all went right.
THEMES are a lot simpler. Not often a theme gets updated, or needs to, for that matter. Though one should constantly check anyhow, as when the core files get changes, man can it lead to some interesting goop on your blog. Links don’t work, or you wind up with some interesting mis matches.
PLUG INS are the thorn in every blogger’s side.
Depending on how many you use, and on how many of your blogs, the upgrade process can, and often is, a full time job. This is especially true after a major core update. (least in wordpress, it is.)
RANT : It really ticks me off, when I go to upgrade a plugin, but it keeps failing, then when visiting the plugin site, it tells me that first you need to deactivate the plugin, and delete the old version, before installing the upgrade.
LIKE WHY OFFER IT AS AN AUTOMATIC UPGRADE THEN?
Consider the time you need, if you are merely upgrading ten plugins on a regular basis, and you use them on ten sites. Talk about time consuming. So what is the solution?
According to this one article, the solution is to simply use one core install of Wordpress, and one instance of each plugin, then you can simply upgrade once, for all your blogs.
Sounds like a perfect solution, until you start to read it. Now if you are blond (like me) all this techno stuff can make your head spin. AND I do mean spin. However, it does seem to be a decent solution, and by using some different parameters in the config file, should work easy enough. Problem is, according to my host, is that it won’t really save any server load issues, but should help in the time management department, when upgrading.
Should note, that if you use wp-super-cache, this is not a solution for you. It becomes a trade off, where you sacrifice that added load speed up, for convenience. Something you’ll have to determine, if its worth the price. (The trade off that is, not cost, as hey, wordpress is free.)
Something I am definitely going to think about trying.
Jul 14th by Malcontent