Merge Announcement: Plugins & Themes Auto-Updates

After making the auto-updates project a feature plugin, the #core-auto-updates team is excited to announce that the plugins and themes auto-updates feature is ready for a coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. merge.

Here are the main features that have been developed:

  • The ability for website administrators to opt-in to automatic updates for plugins and themes.
  • Ability to enable/disable auto-updates on a 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-by-plugin and theme-by-theme basis.
  • 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 support for both themes and plugins auto-updates.
  • Email notifications to send auto-update summaries to website administrators.
  • HooksHooks In WordPress theme and development, hooks are functions that can be applied to an action or a Filter in WordPress. Actions are functions performed when a certain event occurs in WordPress. Filters allow you to modify certain functions. Arguments used to hook both filters and actions look the same. and constants to help developers programmatically define auto-updates settings.

To be clear, plugin and theme auto-updates already exist in WordPress core, but these new features add a fully-featured user interface to allow administrators to opt-in to these features.The feature was developed on WordPress GitHub repository and tested for a few months as a feature plugin available on WordPress repository.

@audrasjb and @pbiron hosted weekly meetings on #core-auto-updates 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/. channel, and those meetings allowed the feature to be developed at a good pace. While there are still some details currently discussed on GitHub, the feature pluginFeature Plugin A plugin that was created with the intention of eventually being proposed for inclusion in WordPress Core. See Features as Plugins. has been a great success, with more than 700 active installations. The plugins and themes auto-updates team is now excited to bring this feature to WordPress users and ship this feature in WordPress 5.5.

Site security is integral for modern website hosting, and bringing auto-updates to plugins and themes is a much-awaited feature in WordPress. This will allow website owners to more easily keep their site up-to-date and more secure. The core plugin team has also added a number of hooks that can be used by plugin authors and WordPress developers to customize the feature, including email notifications.

@whyisjake has opened a core ticket for the core merge. Any help is welcome to test the incoming patches.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the feature plugin on GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/: @audrasjb, @whodunitagency, @xkon, @desrosj, @pedromendonca, @javiercasares, @karmatosed, @mapk, @afercia, @gmays, @knutsp, @pbiron, @passionate, @nicolaskulka, @bookdude13, @jeffpaul, @mukesh27, @whyisjake, @paaljoachim, @ronalfy, @timothybjacobs, @wpamitkumar and @azaozz.

#5-5, #auto-update, #feature-plugins, #feature-projects, #feature-autoupdates