I've been looking through plenty of recommendations and tutorials detailing how to install a Magento Extension from a compressed folder.
However, having manually installed a non-Connect extension, is there a method updating the package, should the or is it simply to delete the old files and install the new (and what should be done with the database)?
In addition is there anyway to compare version numbers from the control panel to confirm that the package has been updated?
You just have to upload the new files (and rewrite them with the old ones). There is no need to delete files. If the extension is written as it should be - there will be upgrade scripts that will automatically update the database.
As far as I know you can't see the version from the admin panel but you can see what is the version of the module in its files -> etc/config.xml -> tag <version>. To see what version is installed please check the database -> table core_resource.
