WordPress, the popular blogging software, often has a minor update out a few days after a major release, to fix security bugs and clean up code – like 3.2.1 coming after 3.2.
If WordPress auto update works for you, then upgrading your blog is a 10 second job. If not, manually uploading files and upgrading the software can be a bit painful task.
More so when you realize that the number of files that have been changed, from a major release like WP 3.2 to 3.2.1 is only a handful of files, usually under 20. An easier way to upgrade would be to overwrite only those changed files, thereby making the upgrade fast and painless even over FTP, on a dialup connection (which is my setup sometimes!).
Follow the steps below to get a zip file containing only the changed files from any other version of WordPress. Note that this does not have to be the just-preceeding release of WP – you can select the two version numbers.
Visit the WordPress Trac and note the revision numbers (listed under Rev column) of the two WordPress versions. Then, enter that into the URL listed below, filling in OLDVERSION and NEWVERSION, and OLDREV (revision no. of older WP version), NEWREV (revision no. of newer WP version).
http://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset?old_path=tags/OLDVERSION&old=OLDREV&new_path=tags/NEWVERSION&new=NEWREV
For example, to get the files that changed from version 3.2 to 3.2.1, you would use the URL:
http://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset?old_path=tags/3.2&old=18397&new_path=tags/3.2.1&new=18439
The above is a working URL – click it and you can download a zip archive of files changed between WordPress 3.2 and 3.2.1.