I spent some time this weekend upgrading a bunch of WordPress sites to the newly released 2.5. So far, I’m completely impressed with this upgrade. The admin functions are truly improved and the overall design is beautiful and much more intuitive than the last admin panel. The dashboard alone is worth the upgrade.

We’ve also taken to a new approach for updating our WordPress sites. Since we’ve had a love affair recently with SVN for version control, I decided it made a lot more sense to use direct SVN checkouts of the tagged releases in the WordPress SVN, rather than FTP’ing the entire WordPress directory every time we get a minor release. So… here’s how we’ve got it set up:

1. First, we run an SVN checkout to get the tagged release. This gives us all the core WordPress files.
2. Next, we upload via FTP all the files that don’t belong to the core WordPress file structure. These files are:
3. wp-config.php
4. .htaccess
5. our custom theme
6. our plugins (besides akismet and hello)
7. the wp-content/uploads folder
8. Then we make sure that uploads folder is writeable by the server, and all should be well.

So with this setup, the next time that we need to upgrade the WordPress release, we can simply SSH into the server and run an svn switch command to the newest tagged release and it will update the changed files. Then we run the upgrade script and we’re there. Much easier when you have to update a dozen WordPress sites at once.

So. Anyone see any gotchas in this approach?