WordPress® Bible, Second Edition

Chapter 15. Performing Automatic Upgrades

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Meeting the minimum automatic upgrade requirements

• Disabling the "upgrade nag"

• Performing automatic upgrades

• Using SSH for automatic upgrades

As easy as WordPress installation has always been, upgrades have tended to create issues for some users. When upgrade time would come around, bloggers would bite their tongues and grit their teeth as they uploaded a new version of WordPress via a file transfer protocol (FTP) client. Less technical users sometimes found FTP a scary thing and did not understand how to connect to the server and perform the upgrade.

Likewise, whenever a theme or plugin needed to be installed or upgraded, bloggers had to rely on FTP to perform the installations or upgrades themselves. It was easy to recognize a solution, but took many cycles of upgrades before Automatic Upgrade was added to the WordPress core.

With Automatic Upgrade, bloggers can provide their server FTP login credentials and WordPress does the rest, downloading files transparently in the background, unpacking the files, and distributing them into place.

Note

Automatic upgrade is somewhat of a misnomer. It is often called one-click upgrading (which is also technically a misnomer, but much more accurate). There is actually nothing automatic about the upgrades. When a new version of WordPress or a plugin becomes available, the blogger has to manually provide credentials to WordPress that enables the process to happen.

For a truly automatic upgrade process ...