Wordpress 2.0.9 updates

This is for those of you that haven't upgraded to wordpress 2.1 yet, and are comfortable following instructions using a command line.

It also assumes you have command-line access to your server. But that's a story for another day

Rather than go through the traditional rigamarole with updating wordpress (2.0.9 was released very recently) I decided to try a different approach. What made this possible was that there were no database changes so no upgrade script was needed.

Anyway, here's how I did it, for the sake of posterity. It's easy... you just need to know what to do. At the end, I provide the file so you don't have to do the svn diff yourself.

Using the public subversion access I used the command:

svn diff http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.0.7 http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.0.9 > wordpress-2.0.7_to_2.0.9.patch

AKA "find the differences between the 2.0.7 tag and the 2.0.9 tag, and write them to a file".

Now, after I did a complete backup of my files: (Very important! Before an upgrade -- *always* back up the files you'll be working on.)

cp -R shadowlife.ca shadowlife.ca.backup

I then moved the patch file ('wordpress-2.0.7_to_2.0.9.patch') to the shadowlife.ca directory (the root of my blog) and ran the patch command to apply the changes:

patch -p0 < wordpress-2.0.7_to_2.0.9.patch

If all goes well, you should see something similar to:

[rernst]$ patch -p0 < wordpress-2.0.7_to_2.0.9.patch
patching file wp-includes/cache.php
patching file wp-includes/wp-db.php
patching file wp-includes/version.php
patching file wp-includes/js/tinymce/wp-mce-help.php
patching file wp-includes/js/tinymce/tiny_mce_gzip.php
patching file wp-includes/classes.php
patching file wp-includes/functions.php
patching file wp-includes/rss-functions.php
patching file readme.html
patching file wp-admin/edit-form-advanced.php
patching file wp-admin/link-import.php
patching file wp-admin/link-categories.php
patching file wp-admin/user-edit.php
patching file wp-admin/options-permalink.php
[rernst]$

Here's the file:

wordpress-207_to_209patch.gz

If something went wrong, just revert to your backup. Post below -- I'll give what help I can.

I don't know if this procedure works with previous versions -- it might -- but the thought never occurred to me to do it before. Since I keep all my blog files in subversion, it's a great help -- I don't have to use rsync to update the core files (as I can't just replace them).

Update:: I did try this technique on a test install of 2.1, using (of course) a different patch. After going to the admin panel and performing the mandatory upgrade, everything ran fine. So this process does work with wordpress upgrades that require database changes.