It is a good thing to know that the GeoServer development team is working hard to frequently release new versions. You may be sure that most of the bugs will be fixed in a short time. On the other hand, this means you have to carefully plan an upgrading strategy in order to download and install any new release without having this affect your site too strongly.
Before you get too worried about this, we want to reassure you. Upgrading GeoServer is not a challenging task, and, with some simple steps, you may preserve your configuration when migrating to a new release.
We will explore the interface and the configuration option of GeoServer in the next chapter. For now, keep in mind that all these settings are stored in the file system in a folder called the GeoServer data directory. As you may guess from its name, it may also contain the spatial data you want to publish with GeoServer; although, this is not always the case. The most important content for the migration...