Updates

I’ve found that the most difficult part of managing lots of WordPress websites is keeping them all synced and up to date. Because of the nature of open source contributions, many third party plugins and themes are abandoned by the original developers for whatever reason. That’s why I try to condense all of the important key features and functionality into one plugin and theme. It’s also important that plugin and theme developers keep their projects up to speed with WordPress core. Although WordPress core does a great job of attending to backwards compatibility, it’s a bit of a disability in taking advantage of the latest features of the programming language or rapidly expanding new features.

I used to just handle updates and upgrades manually until WordPress 3.7 added automatic background updates. After which I started relying on that automatic updates. I have found one fault in using automated updates in that if something goes awry, there’s no one attending to the site. So for some higher profile or higher traffic sites, I’ve purposely disabled major version updates until I have my eyes on them. Because I keep up with core development, I’m usually aware of any breaking changes that might affect a theme or plugin. I’ve found a moderate solution to be most effective by blocking the major core updates but enabling the minor version updates. I do so by setting this constant in the configuration file. 

define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', minor );

For the DWP Theme and Plugin Updates, I set them to be automatic based on the git release tags. This means that I can update the theme and plugin on all of the sites I manage by simply tagging a new release in git. I run my tests locally and I use these two filters in the theme:

add_filter( 'auto_update_plugin', '__return_true' );
add_filter( 'auto_update_theme', '__return_true' );

This approach allows me to depend on the automatic security updates from WordPress core, gives me the ability to keep an eye on the major version core upgrades, and provides me the ability to upgrade all of the DWP themes and plugins at once. I also set an email filter to notify me of those upgrades, so I can just check my inbox to put my eyes on all of them in one run.

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