WordPress Changed Files

Upgrading WordPress can be a real pain! Every few months (or sometimes faster!) the WordPress development team release a new version of the software that either fixes bugs, introduces new features, or often both. Great! However, it takes ages to replace all the installation files with those released as the complete download. Even the new automated upgrade built in to WordPress is limited by the capability of your web hosting account; mine doesn’t allow PHP enough memory to complete the task automatically. Therefore, I tend to look for a list of changed files each time and just replace those. Of course clever people, with the right set-up, can get SVN to do that for them. But having the right set-up is tricky and many people (me included) don’t have the required level of control and tooling on their web hosting account. So I use the WordPress Trac site to tell me what has changed and just upload the changed files. Figuring out what files have changed using Trac can be tricky, here’s my workflow…

• First, find the revision numbers for the two versions of WordPress you want a list of changed files for. Go to Browse Source / Tags and note the “Rev” (revision) number for two tagged versions – your current installation version, and the version you are upgrading to. For example, v2.9 is rev 12455.
• Then build a URL that includes the two tagged versions and their revision numbers. For example, for changed files from v2.9 to v2.9.1 the URL would be:
  http://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset?old_path=tags/2.9&old=12455&new_path=tags/2.9.1&new=12600
• The list of revised files is shown at the top of the page. Plus, for those interested, a list of the changes to those files.
• Use the list of changed files to select the required update files from a complete WordPress download and upload them to your web host.

Hope this is of some help… 😀