I have earlier written about how you can install bbPress via SVN and now I am going to write on how you can change your existing installation to a SVN one so that you get the ease of upgrading to newer versions.
First of all login to your hosting account via SSH and browse to the directory just above where bbPress is installed. Lets say bbPress is installed in a dir named bbpress.
Create a temp directory named bbP in the same level as that of bbpress by issuing the command :
mkdir bbp
Choose directory to get in.
cd bbp
Install the latest version of bbPress like
svn co http://svn.automattic.com/bbpress/tags/1.0.2/ .
Don’t miss the . [dot] after the URL in above command or else bbPress will create a directory inside the current directory and copy the files inside it which is opposite to our requirement of having the files exactly in the current directory.
To avoid any possible issues afterwards, remove the my-templates & my-plugins directory by deleting them.
rm –rf my-templates
rm –rf my-plugins
Select the previous setup folder now
cd ..
cd bbpress
Now copy our custom stuff from present install to the new install
cp -rpf my-templates/* ../bbp/my-templates
cp -p bb-config.php ../bbp/
cp -p .htaccess ../bbp/
Now we will rename the folders to get it going. Rename the older folder (bbpress) to something like bbpress_backup & rename the new folder (bbp) to bbpress
mv bbpress bbpress_backup/
mv bbp bbpress/
That’s it. Your bbPress should be working on the new SVN install now. If you have any issues then just revert the changes in last step
mv bbpress bbp/
mv bbpress_backup bbpress/
Now whenever there is a new version of bbPress, just issue this command to update
svn up
That’s it. It may be a complicated process for you if you are not familiar with terminal or console but its a good time to get used to it anyway.
If you want to integrate with WordPress, you can read the WordPress bbPress integration guide.
Have your say in the comments or ask for help if you are stuck somewhere.