Hey, cool – the cats at wordpress.org have posted a set of suggestions for people preparing for the upgrade to version 2.3 – due out in a couple of days – and they’ve linked to the documentation I wrote on maintaining WordPress with Subversion.
This kind of upgrade has become a fairly big deal for me, as I now maintain more than 40 WordPress installations on Birdhouse and more than 30 at the J-School. Over the past few months I’ve converted all of them to Subversion checkouts, wrapped in a mass-upgrade shell script I wrote, which steps through the array of all installations and upgrades each in sequence. Takes about three minutes to upgrade 30 blogs – a far cry from the manual work I used to put into this process.
The downside is that upgrades inevitably break a few plugins and/or API calls, which means there’s usually a bit of fallout (always fixable). But there’s more benefit in keeping all installations up-to-date than there is downside in risking having some features break temporarily.
Plugin compatibility for 2.3 looks great so far; don’t see anything on the short list that will cause problems for any of my peeps.