Today, WordPress version 3.6, codenamed Oscar, was released to the general public for download. This release brings many changes including, a revamped auto-save and post locking feature, an updated revision browser and native support for audio and video embeds, and improved integration with Spotify, Rdio and SoundCloud cloud music providers.

This brief tutorial is going to show you how to upgrade your current version to the latest version of WordPress so you can take advantage of some of the newest features. If you’ve been using WordPress for a while and you upgrade, you probably wouldn’t notice any change after upgrading because most of the added features are not easily noticeable.

Here are some of the feature that were added.

  • A revamped revision feature which lets you save every change with a new interface that allows you to easily scroll to each change made
  • Post-locking / Autosave feature that automatically save your work both locally and on the save, which makes it very hard to lose your work
  • Built-in HTML5 media player for native audio and video embeds
  • Revamped Menu Editor and more

Before upgrading your server, it’s highly recommended to backup your site’s content and database. This can be done in many ways from SSH terminal console to your host backend tool sets which may include file manager and phpMyAdmin.

Upgrading via SSH Terminal console.

To upgrade using an SSH terminal, sign into your server using SSH client, then run the commands below to backup your site’s content.

 

sudo tar -cvf site-content.tar /var/www/

 

Next, run the commands below to backup the site’s database content.

 

mysqldump -u root - p database_name > database_name.sql

 

When you run the above commands, you may be prompted to enter your password.

After backing up the site’s content, run the commands below to download the latest version of WordPress.

wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip

 

Next, run the commands below to extract the zipped file.

unzip latest.zip

 

Finally, copy the content in the wordpress folder and replace the existing site content.

sudo cp -rf wordpress/* /var/www/

 

After copying the content, go to your wordpress admin page and upgrade the database and you’re done.

Enjoy!