WordPress is one of the well know solutions for running your own blog and is maintained very actively. To keep the pace with the updates wordpress has an integrated updating mechanism which allows updating your installation directly from the administration backend.
In my case I did not like this because I used subversion to install wordpress. Using this method you can update your wordpress installation by switching to another tag in the SVN repository. In addition, this procedure makes sure that your individual changes made to the wordpress core are respected and you can merge the changes with the update.
Unfortunately I usually forget the update commands and so I wrote a small helper script in Perl that can be used for this task.
The source code
#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; # small helper update script because I always forget the command and URL # of Wordpress' SVN repository # use at your own risk. Coded by Thomas Westfeld, www.gorillapatch.com # base url to wordpress subversion repository my $base_url="http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/"; # validate user input die "usage: updateWordpress.pl [version]\n" unless scalar(@ARGV) == 1; die "no subversion repository found. cd into the wordpress directory first\n" unless (-d ".svn"); my $newVersion = $ARGV[0]; die "$newVersion is no valid version number" unless $newVersion =~ /\d+(.\d+)+/; my $currentVersion = &getCurrentVersion; # confirm update from user print "Do you really want to upgrade from current version $currentVersion to $newVersion [y/n]? "; chomp (my $confirm = ); if (uc($confirm) eq 'Y') { system ("svn sw ${base_url}${newVersion} ."); } else { print "update cancelled\n"; exit 1; } exit 0; # use svn info to get the URL of the currently checked out tag sub getCurrentVersion { my $result; open my $version_fh, "-|", "svn info"; while (my $line = <$version_fh>) { if ($line =~ /^URL: $base_url([0-9.]+)/) { $result = $1; } } close ($version_fh); return $result; }
