The WordPress team has discovered and released a new version 2.8.4 to fix a very serious vulnerability that allows hackers to reset passwords.   For those of you running hosted WordPress accounts your admin should have already upgraded your system.  For those of us running our own WordPress on a Unix shell the upgrade can get a bit more complex.

Luckily the Arkayne team has put together a short clean shell script that upgrades your WordPress version to the latest one without destroying templates, security, or permissions. In a nutshell the script gets latest version of WordPress, removes old WordPress control files, saves the configuration, and copies the new files over your install.  The script available for download here is described below:

#! /bin/bash

if [ "$1" == "" ]; then

echo upgrade.bash [directory]

else

INSTALL=”wp-upgrade”
echo UPGRADING $1

echo CREATING UPGRADE DIRECTORY $INSTALL
rm -r $INSTALL
mkdir $INSTALL
cd $INSTALL
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip
unzip latest.zip
cd ..

echo CLEANING $1
cp -r $1 $1_backup
rm -r $1/wp-admin
rm -r $1/wp-includes
mv $1/wp-config.php $INSTALL/wordpress/wp-config.php
rm $1/*.php

echo UPGRADING $1
mv $INSTALL/wordpress/wp-admin $1/wp-admin
mv $INSTALL/wordpress/wp-includes $1/wp-includes
mv $INSTALL/wordpress/*.php $1/

fi

Hope this little nugget helps a few of our users avoid the headache of getting a WordPress installation hacked.

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