Please let me know if you notice anything strange or missing since the upgrade.

My WordPress dashboard has been nagging me to upgrade to the latest version for quite a while now. I was running 2.5.1 up until today, which was released back in April. I’ve been putting off upgrading because it’s always such a pain if you follow the recommended instructions, and I inevitably end up forgetting to migrate some customization I made to the old version.

So, to kill two birds with one stone, I decided to try my hand at upgrading WordPress by using Mercurial to track my changes to the default install, as well as the changes between versions of WordPress.

Preparation:
First, start off with a copy of my blog’s code in a directory called ‘blog’.
Download WordPress 2.5.1 and 2.6.3 (the version I want to upgrade to).

Import initial WordPress code:

tar zxf wordpress-2.5.1.tar.gz # NB: unpacks into wordpress/
mv wordpress wordpress-2.5.1
cd wordpress-2.5.1
hg init
hg commit -A -m 'wordpress 2.5.1'
cd ..

Apply my changes:

hg clone wordpress-2.5.1 wordpress-mine
cd wordpress-mine
hg qnew -m 'my blog' my-blog.patch
hg locate -0 | xargs -0 rm
cp -ar ../blog/* .
hg addremove
hg qrefresh
cd ..

The ‘hg locate -0′ line removes all the files currently tracked by Mercurial. This is needed so that any files I deleted from my copy of WordPress also are deleted in my Mercurial repository.

The result of these two steps is that I have a repository that has the original WordPress source code as one revision, with my changes applied as a Mercurial Queue patch.

Now I need to tell Mercurial what’s changed between versions 2.5.1 and 2.6.3. To do this, I’ll make a copy (or clone) of the 2.5.1 repository, and then put all the 2.6.3 files into it. Again, I use ‘hg locate -0 | xargs -0 rm’ to delete all the files from the old version before copying the new files in. Mercurial is smart enough to notice if files haven’t changed, and the subsequent commit with the ‘-A’ flag will add any new files or delete any files that were removed between 2.5.1 and 2.6.3.

Upgrade the pristine 2.5.1 to 2.6.3:

hg clone wordpress-2.5.1 wordpress-2.6.3
tar zxf wordpress-2.6.3 # NB: Unpacks into wordpress/
cd wordpress-2.6.3
hg locate -0 | xargs -0 rm
cp -ar ../wordpress/* .
hg commit -A -m 'wordpress-2.6.3'
cd ..

Now I need to perform the actual upgrade to my blog. First I save the state of the current modifications, then pull in the 2.5.1 -> 2.6.3 changes from the wordpress-2.6.3 repository. Then I reapply my changes to the new 2.6.3 code.

Pull in 2.6.3 to my blog:

cd wordpress-mine
hg qsave -e -c
hg pull ../wordpress-2.6.3
hg update -C
hg qpush -a -m

Voilà! A quick rsync to my website, and the upgrade is complete!

I have to admit, I don’t fully grok some of these Mercurial commands. It took a few tries to work out this series of steps, so there’s probably a better way of doing it. I’m pretty happy overall though; I managed a successful WordPress upgrade, and learned something about Mercurial in the process! The next upgrade should go much more smoothly now that I’ve figured things out a bit better.

I have verified that the Changed Files ZIP package contains nothing that is not in the original WordPress 2.0.3 download, so it is safe to use as far as I can tell. Verifying this took more time than actually doing the upgrade!

I think the WordPress release team should provide something similar, as this is a much more convienient way of upgrading for those of us with just FTP access to our web hosts.