Most likely, it’s time to upgrade your instance of wordpress (given their releases are every couple weeks).

Backup the db and code:

mkdir -p ~/.archive
mysqldump blog | gzip > ~/.archive/blog-$(date '+%Y%m%d').sql.gz
cd ~/public_html ; tar czf ~/.archive/blog-$(date '+%Y%m%d').tgz blog

Then upgrade. Note that switching from 2.7.1 to 2.8 isn’t just a “svn switch” — you must svn update first.

cd ~/public_html/blog
svn update
svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.8.3/

The next time you hit the wp-admin page, it will upgrade the db and you’ll be done.

  • Update November 15, 2008: 2.6.5 is out. See installing wordpress using subversion.
  • Update December 14, 2008: 2.7 with new admin UI hotness
  • Update June 15, 2009: 2.8 requires an `svn update`
  • Update July 9th, 2009: 2.8.1
  • Update July 22nd, 2009: oye, 2.8.2
  • Update Aug 4th, 2009: oye, 2.8.3