WordPress 2.7 Upgrade In One Line

wordpress

BadPoetry WordPress 2.7 has just been released and features a complete interface overhaul. Hack a Day runs on WordPress MU hosted by WordPress.com, so we got this update last week. We run standard WordPress.org on all of our personal blogs though. We recommend it because it’s free, has a massive userbase, and if you host it yourself, you can do whatever you want with it.

To make the upgrade process as simple as possible (and for the sheer rush of ‘rm -rf’), we use a one line command.

$ curl http://wordpress.org/latest.zip -o "wp.zip" && unzip wp.zip && rm -rf ./wordpress/wp-content/ && cp -r ./wordpress/* ~/www/

curl downloads the latest version from wordpress. unzip unpacks all of the files into a directory called ‘wordpress’. rm -rf removes everything in the ‘wp-content’ directory. Otherwise, you will overwrite your images, themes, and plugins. cp -r copies everything to your http document root, overwriting the previous install.

Naturally, you should back up your current install and database beforehand. We tend to use the one-liner with reckless abandon. If you’re wondering about the terseness, it was designed to fit inside the 140 character limit of Twitter.

[Thanks, Chris Finke]

Free Web Development Tools


OStatic has a collected some great free tools for web developers. We talked about Quanta in an earlier post, but this article reaches beyond just HTML editors. LaunchSplash can be used to generate splash pages while you build. IBM, responsible for the Eclipse IDE, has built Project Zero to encourage web app development; even the IDE is web based. OpenX is an open ad server. Piwik is a free web analytics package. There are also quite a few open source CMS’s and sites collecting open source designs.

Linux Web Development Tools


Download Squad has been publishing an informative series on switching to Linux, and their latest article is about the benefits of web tools on Linux.

HTML editors like Bluefish and Quanta do not have all the features of Dreamweaver, but with many modern CMSes these features aren’t really necessary.

Other benefits include testing out web pages on your Linux home environment, and adding webhosts as remote locations. This makes management, testing, and deployment easier, and can eliminate the need for FTP software.

Bear in mind that the article is only the first part of an ongoing series on Linux web tools, which is itself part of a larger series about switching to Linux.