Probably. Just do the following before updating: Do a direct SQL backup of the database Export your site content Disable all Plugins Switch to the default Theme Then update to the latest version. If anything goes wrong, just restore from your backups, and try an iterative update.
It’s likely that the files aren’t writable by WP for whatever reason. Do a manual upgrade instead. http://codex.wordpress.org/Updating_WordPress#Manual_Update
You can update the theme via cPanel by: Browse wp-content/themes/ using the file manager Rename the folder named ‘TwentyEleven’ to ‘TwentyEleven.Backup’ Download a fresh upgrade copy of T11 from WordPress.org theme repository Upload the .zip theme file (what you just downloaded) Extract the .zip file (it will make the folder ‘TwentyEleven’ again) Your upgraded theme … Read more
How much work is required to maintain WordPress? If you are not maintaining the server itself, very little. Even actual server maintenance doesn’t usually take that much time though. That is, how often are there security updates and new versions that you will probably want? Basically, you want every release. I would not advise skipping … Read more
Yes, we experienced the same problem. It’s related to cron events. Reversed arguments for scheduled task to split terms can cause the database to explode. There is a major bug that has been resolved, see this ticket. @Otto posted a solution to this bug in the WordPress support forums here. This solution worked for us. … Read more
Were those updates done to the default Twenty-Ten theme? If so, it was probably steamrolled by the update. Next time, if you are making edits to ‘twentyten’, go ahead and make a copy of it and save it under a different folder name, then switch to it from ‘Appearance->Themes’ in the dashboard, it shouldn’t be … Read more
The short answer is yes. WordPress does go into maintenance mode when updates are are installed. You have nothing to worry about. This is default behavior. I do know that there are sometimes issues where WordPress gets stuck in maintenance mode after updates, but if you don’t experence such issues, you are good to go … Read more
Yes, index.php is part of core and is liable to be overwritten. In fact, if you look at the process to manually update WordPress, step 7 is: Upload all new loose files from the root directory of the new version to your existing WordPress root directory That may include index.php. You can put custom PHP … Read more
You should probably check your db_charset inside wp-config.php and compare it to the database/tables’ charset. That’s all I can say now since I don’t know your server configuration.
Tetsu, the Codex has some good insights on this: http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_File_Permissions Unfortunately there is no ‘one size fits all’ according to the Codex. It may depend on your host.