Please bear in mind that this is my very own personal experience. Try this at your own risk!

Situation:
Manually installed wordpress on my hosting account, getting tired of upgrading every new version. Decided to switch to Fantastico install, let it handle the upgrades.

Solution:
You must have these:

1. A Cpanel hosting account with Fantastico bundled.
2. A archiving tool(to zip your files).
3. A FTP program(to upload big files).

Step 1: Backup everything.
I seriously mean EVERYTHING. Download a home directory backup, and a Mysql database backup from your cpanel to local computer. Extract the files to see everything is in place(compare to your current hosting account home directory).

Step 2: Purge everything.
Delete everything starts with wp* inside your wordpress directory on the server. For me it is the public_html directory, it has only 1 directory called cgi-bin by default.

Delete your old mysql database for wordpress as well. Please make sure you have all the backups on your local computer.

Step 3: Install a fresh Wordpress with Fantastico.
Pretty standard procedures here. At the end you will get a fresh wordpress at your desired location, for me it’s the webroot. You don’t need to actually login to admin area to do anything yet. Let’s get back the old data first.

Step 4: Restore all old data
4.1 Database
You should have an old database backup with you. Extract it and you will get a file xx.sql. For me it’s wp.sql, which I named the database last time.

Now go to your cpanel, inside ‘Mysql Database’, there’s a link at the bottom for you login to phpMyadmin. Inside phpMyadmin, on the left shows the available databases under your account.

If you removed the old database already, you should see only one on the list which has the name ‘wrdp1‘. This is default database name for new wordpress installed by Fantastico.

Go inside wrdp1 database and choose to import, just upload the old wp.sql file and wait. After it’s done, there will be message telling you how many queries have been made.

Leave phpMyadmin now since the database has been imported.

4.2 Files
Now check the backup you have downloaded, inside wordpress folder you should have your old wp-content folder. You should only take care of 3 things:

1. Upload everything in ‘wp-content/plugins‘ to your fresh installed wordpress, the directory structure should be exactly the same. Do not upload ‘akismet’ and ‘hello.php’
2. Upload everything in ‘wp-content/themes‘ to your fresh installed wordpress. Do not upload ‘classic’ and ‘default’.
3. Upload everything in ‘wp-content/uploads‘ to your fresh installed wordpress.

Step 5: Run the upgrade script
Open browser and go to yourdomain.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php

Step 6: You are done
Things should be okay now, you should be able to login to admin area and your front end.

Again I must stress that this is not a tutorial, it is just my personal experience. If you have previously manual install wordpress on your own, you should pretty much have a clue about I am writing here.

Result:
You are looking at my blog isn’t it? The only uncertainty is……I am not sure whether can Fantastico upgrade the next version for me or not!

Happy upgrading anyway! Feedbacks are appreciated.

New features include:

1. Tagging – I used to have Ultimate Tag Warrior. Need some time to study on this.
2. Update Notification – You will be notified whenever a new release of WordPress is available, and new release of plugins.
3. Improved post and draft management – New “Pending Review” option.

For more details, please check here.

Here’s a list of plugins which I have also upgraded.

1. HeadSpace2
2. Sociable
3. WP Contact Form
4. WordPress Database Backup
5. Google Sitemap Generator

Please leave a comment here if you find any problem in this blog. Thank you.

I would also like to take this chance to introduce you guys a plugin which I have been watching closely, NOT YET installed. WordPress Automatic Upgrade is a plugin brought to you by techie-buzz.com, it will upgrade your wordpress blog automatically. Including download the archive to your web space, replace old files, setting file permissions and more.

As I’ve said I do not use this plugin yet, let’s wait and see. I have a very high expectation on this.

P/S: Please notify me if you find any error after this upgrade.

So I figured it’s time for me to organize all the posts in this blog and come out with a sitemap, in order to submit to the Google Webmaster Tools. Google Sitemap Generator is one of the top ten results upon Google search.

Download the plugin here. Upload the entire folder to your wordpress plugin directory after extract the zip file. You need to make sure that WordPress’s root directory is WRITABLE, because this plugin will generate two sitemap files in that directory.

Enable the plugin in the plugin management page, after that a new option page will be available under “Options”. I did not change much of the default settings, everything should work fine without any problem.

• Remote shell injection in PHPMailer
• Remote SQL injection in XML-RPC
• Unescaped attribute in default theme

Along with other bugs fixed.

• Atom feed validation fixes
• XML-RPC fixes
• Widget backward compatibility fixes
• Widget layout fixes for IE7
• Page and Text Widget improvements

For more details, please refer to this page.

I have just updated WordPress to version 2.2, this is a mandatory upgrade which means the 2.1.X branch will not be continued. Bloggers, you might want to upgrade your WordPress blog as soon as you can because this version consists of 244 bugs fixed.

New features including:

1. WordPress Widgets
   Drag and drop your sidebar items, as simple as that. It was available as a plugin, now being included in the core code.
2. Full Atom support
   Now besides RSS, you have another way to serve your blog feeds.
3. new Blogger importer
   Google Blogger full import. If you have a blogger.com account, and would like to switch to WordPress, you can keep all your posts and comments without any hassle.
4. Infinite comment stream
   This might sounds complicated. Actually it is just an AJAX feature that lets you moderate your blog’s comments with simpler way, as in you will always have 20 Items on the same page after you make some deletes.

For more features listing, please check out WordPress Release Page. Also, while we all enjoy using WordPress so much, see what the contributing author Matthew Mullenweg has to say in his blog.

The problem is that ever since I’ve implemented the “more” tag for better front page sorting, my RSS feed is not able to serve in full text anymore. It inherits the “more” link in the feed, in where you set to trim the post. I’ve been looking for solution for this problem, and I’ve found one.

This is a WordPress plugin brought to you by Computer Guru. CompleteRSS is a plugin that allows you to serve your RSS feed in full HTML. Download page is here.

After activating the plugin, my RSS feed now looks like this.

Full HTML served in RSS Feed.

I’ve noticed a few things here.

1. Your bandwidth usage will increase when the feed is loaded everytime in RSS feed reader.
2. Adsense advertisement block will not display in the HTML RSS Feed.

Well, this is the price I’m willing to pay in order to improve my readership. How about you?

Subscribe to my RSS to get more useful information.

Changelog V1.2

1. Google adsense ready. In sidebar.php, header.php, single.php. Added google site search(page slug needed).
2. Removed gray color sidebar background.
3. Inserted codes for plugins, WP-EMail, WP-PostRatings and WP-PostViews by GamerZ.(http://www.lesterchan.net/)
4. Added feedburner subscription panel.
5. Added Technorati Fave This Blog button.
6. Wordpress 2.1 compatible.

Installation Note
Download the theme and extract to your local file system. Upload the folder “three-col-kubrick-12″ to your wordpress theme directory. ~/wp-content/themes/ by default. Enable the theme in “Presentation” tab.

Optional
Please get GamerZ’s WP-EMail, WP-PostRatings, and WP-PostViews plugins here. Handy plugins to from Lester Chan. You might also want Sociable plugin at here.

Download. Please link to this page instead of the zip file. Thank you.

Hope someone find it useful. Feel free to give me some feedbacks.

There are tons of new features in this version. Following features grabbed my attention the most.

• Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again. (Awesome Ajax feature without loading the page again like you manually save and continue editing.)
• Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
• New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.
• You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.

For other features, you can check the official release page here. I haven’t noticed any flaw in my blog, the refined database code indeed reduces the loading time, this release is highly recommended from me. If you do notice anything wrong with this blog, please feel free to leave a comment down there, or kindly contact me.

Also, notice the google adsense on the sidebar and every single post page, is it too big? I’m looking for some bucks just enough to cover my hosting cost every month, so if you find it annoying, you have my apology in advance.

I did not get the chance to wish you all, Happy 2007! All the best this year!

Update: It turned out that there’s a bug with version 2.0.6. Feedburner will not work if your server is running on apache mod_php. Workaround can be found here.