I have been using Subversion to manage WordPress upgrades for two years now. When WordPress 2.7 appeared, it came with an Automatic Upgrade feature that made one click upgrade possible. Unfortunately, for those of us who have been using Subversion to switch from one WordPress version to another, the Automatic Upgrade feature breaks Subversion. The .svn directories that are essential for tracking and version control are no longer available.

But, I am happy to say the WordPress upgrade went without a hitch. The WordPress 2.8 files were installed and the database upgrade worked as well. This means only one thing: Automatic Upgrade and Subversion can’t co-exist. You either have to use one or the other. Although nothing could be easier than a one click upgrade, I still feel comfortable using Subversion when upgrading WordPress. Maybe, it’s because I know exactly what happens inside the Subversion upgrade.

In addition, I also have multiple blogs to upgrade each time a new WordPress version comes out. To make life easier, I run a small shell script to upgrade all of my WordPress instances at once. Here’s a sample of the shell script below:

#!/bin/sh

# A script to upgrade several WordPress instances using Subversion.

wpv=http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.8

echo “Upgrading domain.com”
cd /home/user/domain.com/
svn switch $wpv

echo “Upgrading domain2.com”
cd /home/user/domain2.com/
svn switch $wpv

As you can see, the shell script is quite simple. I just have to make one minor change to the script every time an upgrade is needed, and that is, to assign the latest tag to the $wpv variable.