For one, you will need a dedicated server/VPS that supports SSH. Otherwise you won’t be able to do it.

Here’s exactly how I do it.

1) I go to my WordPress directory using the command cd. ~ 2 seconds

2) I use wget to pull the latest wordpress files, “wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz” ~ 3 seconds

3) Then I unzip the tar file using “tar xvf latest.tar.gz” ~ 5 seconds (see tar command howto here)

4) Then I remove the wp-admin and wp-includes directories by doing “rm wp-admin -rf” and “rm wp-includes -rf“. ~ 3 seconds

5) Next I will copy over the old WordPress files with the new ones using commands, “cp wordress/* . -rf –reply=yes” ~ 2 seconds.

6) I am done, that’s 2+3+5+3+2=15 seconds. If you are on at least a quad-core CPU server, downloading and unzipping should be rather fast but for those of you on slower servers, give it couple more seconds as download/unzip will take longer.

This is lightening fast compared to downloading WordPress files to your computer, unzipping it then uploading them to your website via FTP. And if you are on shared hosting, sometimes uploading FTP can take forever.

Even if you use built-in upgrade functions in WordPress, you are not going to beat SSH, not even a chance.

Of course, even better than this is to write a simple bash shell script that will do all the above for you. Then you could probably do it in just about 5 seconds. I will try to write a script soon and let you know on that btw. (I just realize it!)

The new WordPress 2.9 released today features a new functionality for WordPress theme designers/coders to add post thumbnails by using the command the_post_thumnail().

Of course, don’t forget that the fact that in order to use this feature, you need to select an image under WordPress admin area and click on “Use as thumbnail”.

I have tried using on older images but seems like it won’t work on the older images. I am sure there’s a way to hack it so the first image of any post will be used as default thumbnail. But I think I will stick with my custom-hack job, it’s already working, why fix it?

For those of you who want to try out the new features without breaking your old post thumbnail code, you can read this blog post, which details on how you can do that.

And also this one for more resources on the_post_thumbnail() function features.

Edit the file simple-tags.php and change the following from this:

if ( strpos($wp_version, ‘2.7′) !== false || strpos($wp_version, ‘2.8′) !== false )

to this:

if ( strpos($wp_version, ‘2.7′) !== false || strpos($wp_version, ‘2.8′) !== false || strpos($wp_version, ‘2.9′) !== false )

I guess it’s because the version numbers were hard-coded, not because the plug-in isn’t compatible with 2.9.