Why would anyone try Installing Wordpress From SVN Repo? I guess that's the first question that comes to people's mind when they come to know about installing Wordpress from official SVN repo. If you have shell access to your webserver/web hosting account, I feel this is the best way to install Wordpress, given that you have some knowledge about SSH, some shell commands & some SVN commands. If you own multiple blogs, this method would be very helpful in updating Wordpress compared to updating via FTP or by downloading and untarring files. Installing via SVN repo is easy, no downloading, un-taring and the best part is to update an to a newer (or even older if you want, though I have not tried it) version of Wordpress. Installing via SVN you can choose to install the bleeding-edge development version of Wordpress or the latest stable version of Wordpress. In this article we'll see how to install the stable version of Wordpress. Fresh Install We'll use the SVN checkout to fetch the latest version Wordpress (version 3.4 at the time of writing this) into the document root of the web server (I am assuming you are running the whole website on Wordpress and there's nothing else, in case you want to install Wordpress as a part of your exisiting website use a different folder, say www.example.com/blog/). You'll need the svn client to be installed on the server, which should not be a problem as it is pre-installed in most web hosting servers. Follow the instructions below: Code: [pradeep@smsfreaks pradeep]# cd /var/local/www/ [pradeep@smsfreaks www]# svn checkout http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/3.4 . The . character stands for current directory, if you want the source to be checked out to a different directory specify that. When the checkout is complete, run the normal Wordpress installation procedure by visiting http://<your_domain>/wp-admin/install.php Updating To A Newer Version To update to newer version of Wordpress we'll use the SVN switch command, for safety take a backup of the existing files (atleast backup wp-config.php & .htaccess files), technically only files natively provided by Wordpress will be overwritten, all other files like plugins, themes, etc will remain intact. Code: [pradeep@smsfreaks pradeep]# cd /var/local/www/ [pradeep@smsfreaks www]# svn switch http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/3.4 . After the command completes, overwrite backup wp-config.php & .htaccess files from backup and then visit http://<your_domain>/wp-admin/upgrade.php so that Wordpress can make necessary database updations, if any. That's all you would be running the latest version of Wordpress. More Info You can download the best & the most popular SSH client for Windows - PuTTy - from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html If you are running a Windows server with GUI access, you can use Tortoise SVN - a SVN client - available at http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/
