WordPress’ plugin team has published a statement regarding plugins making changes to users’ update services: Unless your plugin has the purpose of managing updates, you must not change the defaults of WordPress’ update settings. You may offer a feature to auto-update, but it has to honor the core settings. This means if someone has set their site to “Never update any of my plugins or themes” you…
Buried in the changelog of a series of minor releases that dropped before the Christmas holiday, All in One SEO plugin users were given the surprise gift of automatic updates. After a seemingly endless run of releases (12 updates during a span of six weeks at the end of 2020), the plugin’s developers decided to…
WordPress 5.6 is set to add a UI that allows users to opt into auto-updates for major versions of core. Previously, developers could turn these updates on by setting the WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE constant to true or by using the allow_major_auto_core_updates filter. Version 5.6 exposes this setting in the UI to make it more accessible for users. Jb Audras posted a dev note…
WordPress’ Core systems team had an eventful Friday when an error in the auto-update system caused sites to update to WordPress 5.5.3-alpha-49449, including live production sites with no auto-update constants defined. Those who received an email about the update logged into their sites to see the message: “BETA TESTERS: This site is set up to install…
WordPress 3.7 ‘Basie’ was released on October 24, 2013 and introduced automatic updates for minor releases to the masses. Although it’s not labeled as such, WordPress 3.7 has effectively acted as a LTS version or Long-term support. Security updates and crucial bug fixes have been ported back to previous branches up to 3.7. In this…
When a critical security vulnerability was discovered in Yoast’s SEO plugin this week, WordPress.org took the initiative to automatically update users’ sites with the patched version of the plugin. Many users were taken by surprise, given that the WordPress codex clearly stated that automatic plugin and theme updates are disabled by default. Shortly after the…
WordPress 3.9.1 was released late last week, resolving 34 bugs. This maintenance release includes several important fixes for multisite, TinyMCE, the customizer, widgets, and the new audio/video playlists. Site administrators who are still doing manual updates are encouraged to bring their sites up to the latest. WordPress lead developer Andrew Nacin reported that in the…