WordPress 2.6.1 is out. Reading feeds on my flight from IND to PHX this afternoon I ran across the WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin (shouldn’t that be the Automattic?). Nice, but I’d like to plug my approach to managing WordPress upgrades, which I think is even easier, assuming you’re OK with minimal command-line interaction.

First, install WordPress from a Subversion checkout; do: “ $ svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.6/“ instead of downloading the .zip or .tar.gz file. Configure as directed.

Then, when a new version is available, log into your webhost and run: “ $ svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.6.1/“ from your install directory.

Done.

Note that you can also do something similar (but an order of magnitude more complex, at least for my brain) using git and git-svn if you want to version your local settings as well. Perhaps one day Asheesh or I will get that written up.