I have always been frus­trated that the “Upgrade Auto­mat­i­cally” option doesn’t work as adver­tised. I have to muck around with a few files, go to my FTP client, etc. This is the sec­ond time I have upgraded, so it was much eas­ier. (I was sur­prised I remem­bered what to do. The tuto­r­ial helped the first time — and I had it open for ref­er­ence the second.)

Also — plu­g­ins — the auto­matic upgrade works for some and not oth­ers. (For exam­ple, I was sur­prised when WP’s own Stats plu­gin would not upgrade automatically.)

Now I can’t com­plain too loudly — Word­Press is free soft­ware, and I like it oh so much more than blogger.

Funny enough, when I asked Matt Mul­len­weg (Mr. Word­Press him­self) at Word­Camp Den­ver in Feb­ru­ary 2009 about this, he kind of looked at me like I was partly insane. Appar­ently I am the only per­son in the uni­verse who has ever expe­ri­enced these problems.

Neo­phyte note: If you let Word­Press host your blog (like yourblog.wordpress.com), then Word­Press auto­mat­i­cally updates the soft­ware for you. My com­ments here only apply to self-hosted sites.