A few weeks ago I finally made the upgrade jump from WordPress version 2.5.1 to version 2.6.2. I skipped the versions in between because while I haven’t got a lot of experience upgrading WordPress, from what experience I have had it has usually been a pain. Especially if I’ve done any kind of customization (which I have).

So when I did make the jump to 2.6.2 I resolved to do it in such a way that any future upgrades would be easy. So what’s the obvious solution to the problem of controlling versions? Version control, of course! I am a big Subversion user and luckily the creators of WordPress are Subversion users too!

With a bit of Googling I came across this “How To Upgrade WordPress Using Subversion” page. I basically followed the instructions in the section called “Switching an Established Blog to Subversion”.

So today I logged in to the administration side of the site and find a suggestion that I upgrade to WordPress 2.6.3. Time to test my simpler upgrade set-up. So I log into my site via SSH, switch into the directory containing my WordPress site (after making a backup of it, just in case), and I execute the following command:

svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.6.3 .

and the result:

U    wp-includes/class-snoopy.php
U    wp-includes/version.php
U    wp-admin/includes/media.php
Updated to revision 9351.

Three files quietly updated. I logged into the administration side of the site again, just to see if there were any associated database upgrades for version 2.6.3 (there weren’t) and I see that I am now successfully running WordPress version 2.6.3.

Absolutely painless!