‘Upgrade Automatically’ is the best. thing. ever.
I’ve been using WordPress since 1.5 and I always hated upgrading plugins and WordPress itself because you have to go out a site, find the file, download it, upload it to your webhost, and if you’re upgrading a plugin, you have to go and reactivate it. If you’re upgrading WordPress, then it’s even a worse experience, you have to rebuild the WP database and then your site is live again. The whole process just sucked, took far too long and was too painful for my tastes.
Luckily for me, WordPres 2.5 started letting you automatically upgrade most (I’m not 100% it works on all plugins) installed plugins. Just click the link, it goes out to find the new version, installs it and reactivates it all while you sit and watch. A lot of people will argue with me, but I think it might just be the best feature in WordPress 2.5.
Now that I’ve been working in 2.5 for a few months I’ve started wonder why the developers didn’t implement that same type of experience for upgrading WordPress itself. I think having a link you can click to upgrade the WordPress install - instead of forcing me to go out to the site and grab the file - is a much better solution. Clearly they thought about it when it came to the plugins, but not the system. If only someone would create a plugin that did this very thing!
Someone has
This is the thing that I love about WordPress, the community keeps coming up with ways to push the system, add functionality and create something better than any teams of developers could on their own. The plugin, the appropriately titled “Wordpress Automatic Upgrade Plugin” was created by Techie Buzz years ago. Apparently, I just have a hard time keeping up. I just used it to upgrade from 2.5 to 2.5.1 and it was painless - it even backs up my database and installation files and lets me download them before making any changes, which is just genius.
We all have a favourite plugins, but this one just made it to the top of my list.
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