Upgrading wordpress


While reading through the wordpress dashboard this weekend, I noticed that several new security advisories were announced for the version of wordpress I was using. To mitigate potential security issues, I decided to upgrade to Wordpress 2.0.2 and Spam Karma 2.2. The upgrade process was super simple, and I will describe it below.

To begin the upgrade, you need to grab the latest versions of wordpress and spam karma:

$ wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip

$ wget http://wp-plugins.net/sk2/sk2_final.zip

Once the files have been downloaded to a location on the server you plan to upgrade, you can unzip them to a staging location ( this BLOG posting assumes that you are upgrading a version of wordpress that lives in a directory named public_html in your home directory):

$ mkdir ~/public_html/staging && cd ~/public_html/staging && unzip ~/latest.zip

$ cd ~/public_html/staging/wordpress/wp-content/plugins && unzip ~/sk2_final.zip

Once the files are extracted, you will need to copy your existing wordpress configuration file to the staging directory:

$ cp ~/public_html/wordpress/wp-config.php ~/public_html/staging/wordpress/wp-config.php

If everything completed successfully, you should be able to view the new wordpress version by prepending the word staging to your wordpress administrator URL. Wordpress will prompt you to upgrade the database schema, and once that completes, you can backup the current version and move the staging version into place. This entire process takes less than 10-minutes, and the new version has lots of cool features. Nice!

This article was posted by Matty on 2006-03-18 20:22:00 -0400 -0400