If you’ve hosted a WordPress blog for any amount of time, you are probably familiar with the traditional upgrade procedure. It is fairly painless, but it involves downloading and copying files. If you have some custom files somewhere, you run the risk of forgetting one or two (like .htaccess) which might lead to undesirable results. Even when everything goes well, it still takes time to copy things around on your server.
There is a much easier way. By using Subversion, you avoid all of the downloading and copying. There are some excellent instructions for installing/updating WordPress with Subversion on the WordPress site. Once your blog installation is set up with Subversion, upgrading to a new version only requires one command–two if you make a backup, which is highly recommended.
The 2.3.2 release of WordPress was released on the 29th of December. This release patches a security hole and fixes a few other bugs.
Additionally, this release allows one to create a custom database error page. If WordPress encounters a problem connecting to the database, it will show the template located at wp-content/db-error.php rather than the default error message. If you would like to customize your DB error, just create a template file, name it “db-error.php” and upload it to your site’s wp-content directory.
By the way, if you are not using subversion to manage your WordPress installations, you should start. It makes life much, much easier at upgrade time.