So… How long does it take for you to update your WordPress.org sites?

A while back we decided to switch all our WordPress installs to svn, since the good people over at WordPress release their software via svn tags.

So now, the process of updating a WordPress site consists of this: backup the database, disable all the plugins then do the svn switch, which looks like this:

http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5

hit the wp-admin page again (which will update the database… You remembered to back up, right?) then re-enable the plugins. And you’re pretty much done.

With fast connections, the whole process only takes about 5 minutes per site. You can’t scp faster.

Obviously, do a few tests on your own, and get the process under your fingers, but this becomes such a time saver.

If you’re not using svn (or a similar technology… Personally, I like git, and here’s one reason why…), you’re asking for trouble. See problem #36 here.

Now if only more of the tools that we all depend on would do svn tagging… (of course, we already know that Zend does… but we need more!)