Upgrade Wordpress to 2.6.3 Quickly

WordPress 2.6.3, which was released yesterday, is a patch release that fixes two security vulnerabilities involving Snoopy, a library that WordPress uses internally.

All WordPress users should upgrade to the latest WordPress version to avoid being a victim of this particular vulnerability. There are many obvious and less obvious ways to upgrade WordPress, a few possible ways, in decreasing order of required time, are:

• Download the latest WordPress source, unzipde it on your harddisk, connect to your server via ftp and transfer the files. Then follow the upgrade instructions on the WordPress website. This is the method Windows users are most likely to use ;-)
• Do the above, but transfer files via scp
• Log on to your server via ssh / putty, do a wget http://wordpress.org/download/ to download the latest installer zip file. Unzip using unzip latest.zip. mv the required files to your WordPress folder and run the installer using the instructions from the WordPress website.
• Download and install the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin on your WordPress blog. Go to the plugin page and follow the simple instructions each time there is a new upgrade available. This is suitable if you are running a single blog.
• If you want to upgrade from 2.6.2 to version 2.6.3 , you simply need two files [file1] and [file2]. Just download and overwrite these files in your wp-includes folder, afte changing their permissions, using any one of the methods listed above. Doing it via ssh/wget/cp should take less than a minute.

Whichever method you choose to use, do keep your WordPress installation up-to-date to avoid potential problems and hacking attempts.