I am using Wordpress 2.8 at my blog. I tried upgrading automatically but it did not work. I dont know how to do the chown stuff. Isn’t there any easy way ?

I also have another blog and I would like to upgrade to WP2.9 there also. Any suggestions or help etc ?

a) Having the file system writable by www-data; or b) Eval’ing the code out of a database (ala TextPattern templates);

Given how bad eval is, I’d go for the file system upgrade.

Incidentally, fastest way to do the “open up perms and switch” dance is to make yourself part of the www-data group, but own the files yourself:

sudo chown -R crosby:www-data /path/to/files/*

Then just add write permissions for group:

sudo chmod -R g+w /path/to/files/*

upgrade, and then remove perms:

sudo chmod -R g-w /path/to/files/*

Stick those commands as an alias inside your .bashrc and you’re away.

As for the wp-content bit, that was a slip of my hands whilst typing – I’ve updated it now. Yup, when I changed the permissions I did it for the entire WP tree.

I had this set up like this and upgrading nicely, but it always felt a bit insecure. I’m no security expert, but something about leaving your plugin and theme directories (and possibly more) writeable by the web server process feels a bit unnecessarily dangerous. Or am I being over-paranoid?

The built-in upgrade system is just so nice, though, so these days I have the permissions locked down, and then temporarily open them up, do the upgrade through the web interface, and then lock them down again. Sounds like a hassle, but I find it easier than futzing around with zip files and remembering which files I’m supposed to update manually.