System Wide Plugin updates
Posted on June 8th, 2010 in On Business, Page.ly Service Updates by Joshua Strebel | 5 Comments »
Plug it in baby
So we are about to implement a new feature at page.ly: System wide plugin updates
Just like we keep your WP Core install up-to-date we can now do the same thing for your all your plugins. Of course you have always had the ability to update your own plugins (Tools > Upgrade .. have you done this lately? you should!), but we can now update any plugin on any site on our service. So this brings up a couple points I was hoping our customers and readers could help us with.
Sometimes a plugin update will “break” WordPress, and sometimes a WP Core update will “break” because of an outdated plugin. So the nature of the page.ly WordPress Hosting service is that WP will always be updated on our service regardless, and we figure the latest version of plugins will be compatible with newest versions of WordPress as the majority of plugin authors plan for new releases.
So this begs the question. Do we force plugin updates system wide, or allow customers to opt-out of automatic plugin updates and do it themselves? The way we see it, since WP will always be updated on our system.. it makes sense (and better security) to ensure that all plugins are as well.
Planned Implementation: Every couple weeks our system will upgrade all plugins on every site. If a forced plugin update nukes a site (a whitescreen) we will deactivate all plugins, and re-enable the half dozen or so we know work and then send you an email that there was an issue with one of your plugins (hard to tell which one) and you can turn them on one-by-one to find the culprit. This whitescreen/compatibility check will be automatic at the time of upgrade.
Are customers willing to trade a the possibility of 1 or 2 of their plugins being disabled if they are not working for the ease of never having to manually upgrade them + the added security of the entire system being up to date?
Am I rambling, or making sense? What do you folks think?
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Posted on June 8th, 2010 in On Business, Page.ly Service Updates by Joshua Strebel5 Comments You should leave one too. »
This sounds great, Josh! I have a question:
Do you have a way of knowing which sites break (whitescreen) from an update or would we have to be checking our own sites continuously? I would certainly opt in to have Pagely do the plugin updates as that is one less thing I have to do for my clients sites. I’m hoping you will keep adding monthly maintenance features that will remove the need for me to handle any of it. Thanks!
Yeah Christine, the whitescreen check and plugin reset is automatic. So you would not have to check anything. Only if you got an email that there was a problem with a plugin, you would login and turn on plugins 1by1 till you found it. Then you could turn them all back on except that 1.
And again, even if we do an automatic reset, important plugins like all-in-one-seo-pack, akismet, etc. would be turned back on automatically by us.
Thanks for the details. Sounds fantastic to me!
When I first checked out Pagely, my reaction was something like, “this is cool, but why bother updating the core if people are going to have to log in and update plugins anyway?” It seemed nice, but just half-way there.
So a plugin update feature would be awesome – and if the system can automatically check that it hasn’t broken the site, so much the better.
On the other hand – I’m guessing there are some who just use Pagely because it’s easy to get going, but want to login all the time and take full control of their site – so it seems an opt-out would be appreciated.
Either way, it’s great to hear you’re working on such big improvements here.
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