Shiny Updates v2

Shiny Updates v2

What is Shiny Updates?

With the stated goal of “Hiding the The Bleak Screen of Sadness”, the shiny updates team is working on bringing a smoother experience for managing plugins and themes to WordPress.

Shiny Updates v2 is an effort to continue the shiny updates effort from WordPress 4.2. The original shiny update feature only includes shiny pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party updates. The new version aims to extend this to all aspects of updates, installs, and deletes for plugins, themes in WordPress.

There are numerous screens in the Adminadmin (and super admin) that allow you to install, update, and delete themes, plugins and WordPress itself. Shiny updates is exploring ways to improve their design and especially to offer a better user experience by improving perceived performance and limiting confusing notifications.

What does it do?

The shiny updates plugin currently enables the following features:

  • Deleting single plugins, bulk updating and bulk deleting plugins from the plugin page.
  • Shiny plugin installs from the plugin install screen: multiple actions can be queued up.
  • Shiny theme installs, updates, and deletes, multiple queue-able, including multisitemultisite Used to describe a WordPress installation with a network of multiple blogs, grouped by sites. This installation type has shared users tables, and creates separate database tables for each blog (wp_posts becomes wp_0_posts). See also network, blog, site.

What is still being worked on?

Currently the team is brainstorming a complete rethink of the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. updates page (update-core.php), working to improve clarity and enable easier Update All functionality. Work on that is happening here: https://github.com/obenland/shiny-updates/issues/5

How can I help?

Anyone can help by testing the plugin! Download and install the plugin, then test out all the shiny features: try installing, updating, and deleting plug7ins and themes, including bulk actions, on both single and multisite. Does everything work as expected? Are there any jarring flows? Missing notifications?

Please report any issues on the Github repository, or drop in the #feature-shinyupdates channel in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. to ask questions or give feedback. It’s also where we have our weekly chats, on Tuesdays 19:00 UTC. Thank you!

P.S. Props @adamsilverstein for ghost-writing this post.

#feature-plugins, #needs-testing, #shiny-updates, #upgrade-install