New to SVN - advice on how to best setup with external sources?

[eluser]krif[/eluser]
Hi,

I have been going through some of the posts regarding SVN. After reading this setup HOWTO and Michael Wales' post on setup I still have some questions. (I am new to SVN, so even though I read through the TortoiseSVN 1.6.1 user guide and some howtows on the Tigris site, please bear with me.)

My situation:

* I have a CI project that integrates with a Wordpress blog.
* Staging and live server are a shared hosting environment on Linux
* I develop locally on Windows XP, currently I am the sole programmer (might change)


What I couldn't figure out so far with external sources:

I would like to be able to keep up to date with the CodeIgniter and Wordpress SVN repositories. As far as I see it, svn:externals seems to be the right way to do that.

Now I have patched some CI and Wordpress source files. Is there a way to keep my patched lines when updating my working copy? (The same would apply to my local copies of config files as well of course.) Sorry if this a super basic question, I couldn't figure it out yet.

Also, I have added some helpers and library files within the CI folder structure - would they be affected by an SVN update?

As I am developing on Windows, I obviously can't use symlinks.


On the other hand, I am wondering: Maybe my approach is wrong and I should avoid this setup altogether and just manually update the CI and WP files in my project?


My folder structure looks something like this at the moment (public www root, also my SVN repository root):

Code:

.htaccess
favicon.ico
index.php              <- CI index.php
system/                <- CI system folder
css/
scripts/
media/
blog/                  <- WordPress folder
[some other files]

Any suggestions greatly appreciated!

[eluser]krif[/eluser]
ah dang, wrong forum? Should this rather be in 'Discussion'?