About the time that I began using subversion as a Wordpress publishing platform, the good folks at Wordpress began to include automated update buttons within their platform. When new versions become available, you just go to your Wordpress Dashboard, click update, cross your fingers, and smile, because so far it has worked every time!

Just went to 2.7 via svn. Backed up the xml file. Applied the script in the blog directory. Clicked through the admin prompts. All done. Now I see that wordpress is going to automate its own upgrades. Very cool. Anyway, if you’re still interested in subversion as a wordpress publishing platform, get the directions from the horse’s mouth.

Oh my, look at this. Just released (and still in beta form) is Alex Günsche’s management tool for backing up and upgrading all your wordpress sites. He says it’s 30 times faster that the usual ftp method. I’ll wait for after beta. But so far, the ratings are good. This could be a subversion alternative.

Went from 2.5.1 to 2.6 with the switch command as instructed by the WordPress gurus. Received a database upgrade prompt. Clicked ok. Everything appears to be working fine. Of course, I also took the sage advise of backing everything up first. So that took a few minutes.

I have experience with three “subversion” hosts: Textdrive, Dreamhost, and A2Hosting. For my level of skill, Textdrive is still like walking into a room full of experts, where everything is way cool and pretty much above my reach. If you know how to bash, go there and do that. If you don’t know how to bash, you’ll probably learn something interesting anyway.

At Dreamhost, they build you a friendly shelf just a little lower down; it’s called their “Goodies” menu, which makes things a little more accessible.

At A2Hosting, you get to work with CPanel for the usual chores of web publishing (something I got used to at Bluehost).

Of course, in order to work with subversion, you need to do SOME shell command-line work, which means you have to use a client like Putty (or WinSCP) in any case.

BTW, ALL the customer service folks above have been terrific.