I got an email the other day saying my site was automatically updated to WordPress 4.3.2. How did that happen? I’m self-hosting this website, and I’d not logged in for a couple of months.
It turns out whenever your site requests a page, that is, someone visits your website, this page load will trigger a check for updates.
The update runs in the background via wp-cron. wpL_cron checks whether there are any scheduled events in the database. If yes it calls spawn_cron(), which starts another PHP process to do all the actual work.
Lots of processes in WordPress are handled by the cron system: scheduled post publishing, processing pings, update checks, etc.
The automatic update only happens when wordpress.org releases a new minor or security update. Otherwise (for a “major” release like WP 4.3 to 4.4) you must do the update manually by logging in to the back end.
I am far enough along in my WordPress training that I decided it was time to come up with SOME backup solution. Reading through the section of my WordPress book, Backing Up a WordPress Site, I found that, as with Joomla, backup isn’t built in. Instead your main choices are:
choosing an automated backup service such as VaultPress or BackupBuddy for a monthly fee;
backing up with a free plug-in such as Online Backup for WordPress;
or manually: backing up your files over FTP and backing up your database via an SQL dump from PhpMyAdmin.
Note, I see I’m taking a long time in getting around to why I chose Akeeba Backup for WordPress, but from reading so far you have gotten an idea of how I have been researching extensions for Joomla and now, WordPress.
Anyway, I settled on BackUpWordPress as being very popular and free, installed it, looked it over, and found that you RESTORE your website from backup via FTP and PhpMyAdmin. It seems the only benefit to this tool is it facilitates MAKING the backup. Restoration requires about the same steps as restoring a manually made backup, as described above. Are you kidding me?
I went over to the Akeeba Backup for WordPress website and downloaded and installed the plugin. It looks like as with Akeeba for Joomla, there’s a Pro paid and Core free version. I got the free version for now, installed it and was happy to see its familiar user interface at my WordPress dashboard (see this post’s featured image above, and the “manage backups” image below).
Akeeba Backup for WordPress – Manage Backups
The video tutorial showed me that websites are restored or moved using the familiar (to Joomla users) kickstart.php process:
Make a new database if necessary
Upload kickstart.php and the Akeeba archive file to the website’s home directory
Run myWebSite.com/kickstart.php and follow the instructions to restore the website.
I don’t know why Akeeba Backup for Joomla is not listed in the WordPress plugins website, but once it’s there I predict it will become one of WordPress’ most popular plugins.
What’s your favorite backup solution for WordPress?
“###” that is. The formatting shortcuts are a new feature of WordPress 4.3.
Starting a bullet list with “*”
Asterisk that is, followed by space then a character
To get out of the list, hit two newlines
Here comes a numbered list:
Item one
Start it with digit followed by )
“1)” that is
End of my list.
Note, to get the link to open in a new window, I don’t see the option in the add link menu. I added “target=’_blank'” in “text” mode.
Dino the bike horn dinosaur
Since every post should have an image, I’ll provide a copy of my “sites icon” here. Sites icon is a feature that came along in WP 4.3.
By the way, how to center the caption? It looks like I’ll have to modify the theme’s CSS, to style figcaption or class=”wp-caption-text” to have style text-align: center. Maybe when we get to child themes? I’ve tagged this post with “learn” to indicate something TO learn. Maybe I can have an additional tag “learned” to indicate posts demonstrating things I’ve learned.
Paragraph Breaks vs. Newlines
Enter/newline starts a new paragraph
Shift-Enter gives you line breaks
Pendergast Ave.
Cupertino, CA 95014
(408) 255-3767
Yup, one less reason to go to HTML view. Does shift-enter work in JCE as well?
Spell Checking
Use Firefox: turn it on here: options > advanced > general > check my spelling as I tyyyype. (It took looking in options again to start checking.)
