How to Maintain Your WordPress Plugin from a Windows Workstation using Subversion

I’ve been asked several times for an easy introduction into WordPress Plugin maintainance via Subversion. This post is supposed to be a sequal to Things to do when you release a WordPress Plugin. Almost everyone managed to get an account on WordPress Extend. But what to do exactly when you receive that email from Matt, telling you that the SVN repository is waiting for your plugin?

These 3 easy steps assume you are the only person maintaining the plugin in question. As an example and for the purpose of this tutorial I’ll do an update on BackUpWordPress, one of my own plugins.

Prerequisites:

• Get yourself a copy of Tortoise SVN

Step one

create an empty directory on your Windows Machine, rightclick for the context menu and choose “Checkout Repository” and check out the HEAD revision by leaving the default options set.

You’ll see a dialog window, telling you what happens. Wait until it states “Completed”.

Step 2

Press Ok to close the dialog. When you look at the directory’s icon (mine is just on my desktop) you should see a green swoosh:

This means, that your local working copy of the repository is up to date. Now Let’s assume, you’ve edited you plugin somewhere else in the meantime: Copy the sourcefiles to you local working copy of your SVN-repository by dropping the contents of your plugin directory onto the trunk directory of your working copy

If you want to keep track of your plugin’s versions, create a directory under the “tags” directory, name it just as your current plugin’s version (in my case 0.3.1) and copy the plugin sourcefiles there as well.

Now you should recognize an “out of date”- exclamation mark on the directory icon for you working copy and those subdirectories that have been changed:

Step 3

Now we are ready to commit the changes to the repository. Right-click the working-copy’s directory and choose “SVN commit”:

Now that’s it! Couldn’t be easier!