WordPress 2.6.2 is officially out now, and I’m yet again inconvenienced by having to upgrade. Since I installed from source by unpacking the ZIP file downloaded at WordPress.org, I have to go through the process of doing it all over and overwriting the old material. It’s a real pain and I’m always nervous I’m going to screw it up and hose my custom theme.

In retrospect, I really should have installed WordPress using Subversion. Providing you have Subversion installed on your server (apt-get install subversion), installing and updating WordPress is infinitely easier than doing it from source. Here are the steps you need to follow to install and update WordPress using Subversion:

Installation

1. Figure out which version you want to install (you can browse tags here)
2. Change directory to your web-accessible document root
3. Run mkdir blog and cd blog to get down into your blog directory. This can be customized to whatever directory (or root) you need it to be in.
4. When you’re in the location where you want your blog installed, run : svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.6.2 .
   Be sure you enter it exactly as shown, meaning don’t forget the trailing period.
5. Point your browser to your blog and go through the installation process.

Upgrading

This is where using Subversion makes your life so much easier. Assuming you have anything older than the current version installed:

1. Run the command: svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.6.2/ . (this operation will tell your .svn files to switch the repository to the new location and download the correct files)
2. Point your browser to your blog and go through the upgrade process

Converting the Packaged Installer to a Subversion Checkout

1. Create a new temporary blog directory: mkdir blog-new
   
2. Use the Subversion commands from above get WordPress
3. Copy all your custom files from the old blog location to the temporary directory
4. Rename the temporary directory to match the old directory name: mv blog blog-bak, then mv blog-new blog
5. Point your browser to your blog and go through the upgrade process

A hidden gem of using Subversion is that you can install any version you want without having to dig through and find old packages. If you want to install WordPress 2.0 for some reason, you certainly can by entering that tag in place of 2.6.2 above. As always, you should make a backup before you make any changes of this magnitude.

Information via WordPress Codex