Introducing: Automatic Updater for WordPress

Are you sick of having to wait several seconds for your WordPress site to update? Tired of your plugins not being updated as soon as an update is available? Well, do I have the solution for you! Automatic Updater for WordPress is a light-weight plugin that downloads and installs updates as soon as they become available – keeping your WordPress site up-to-date, secure, and minty fresh!

With the hyperbole out of the way, I do have a few things to note:

  • This plugin really does update your site, without your supervision, at any time, day or night. This is awesome for WordPress Core, but may suck if a bad version of a plugin is released – at the very least, the plugin may be disabled, at worst, your site may be taken offline. Exercise appropriate caution.
  • No backups are taken. You really should be using a good backup system, whether it be one of the multitude of backup plugins, or a backup service like VaultPress.
  • If your site breaks because of this, I’m really sorry. I’d appreciate it if you took your anger and channelled it into writing up a thorough bug report, instead of plotting my demise.

Thanks, and have fun!

21 comments

  3. Great work, Gary! When I saw your tweet about your own installation auto-updating, I was hoping this would be the result!

    Some sort of post-update error check and/or email notification would be nice. Then you’ll at least know an update happened, rather than guessing one happened because now your site is borked 😉

    1. Thanks Japh! It’s pretty basic at the moment, but better error checking and notifications will certainly be coming – I want this to be a bit of an experiment in the update experience. WordPress already has the best update experience of any CMS out there, but we can always be better. 🙂

  4. Thanks a lot for this great plugin. All plugin updates went fine 🙂 Does the plugin recognize other language versions of WordPress like the German one? This would be cool, if the plugin considers the website’s language. Keep up the good work!

    1. Great to hear it worked for you!

      I just ran a test updating WordPress 3.3.2-de_DE, it automatically updated to WordPress 3.4.2-de_DE. I knew I included those language checks for a reason. 🙂

      The only thing I’m not sure about is what will happen when a new en_US release happens before the corresponding de_DE version is available. I’ll test this when WordPress 3.5 is released, and I’d appreciate it if you could do the same, in case I don’t catch that window.

      1. Thanks for the quick response.

        I would love to do a translation into German. But there seems to be a problem with text domain definition: This plugin has a plugin text domain definition in the header fields, but seems to load any translation.

        btw: I still (v.0.3.1) get a notify mail to update WordPress to the same version.

        1. Ooops, I forgot to tell it to load the text domain. I just released version 0.3.2, which fixes that, and (hopefully) fixes the redundant core updates.

  5. Great work, if you’d be interested in writing about your plugin and why you created on WPMayor.com please do get in touch, I think it would be a great post.

  6. *strokes imaginary white cat whilst cackling evilly*

    I’m trying to add i18n to my plugin – I’m not really sure I’ve done it correctly. Are there any guides to simple folks like me?

    Also, I noticed you added SVN support. Does that mean that Updater works on bleeding edge installation?

  7. Hey I must say this is one of the best WordPress plugins. This has and will continue to save me HOURS managing all my wp sites.

    One tiny suggestion. Could u please have an option. To turn off sending emails.

    Maybe add a log file or a page for logs

    Thanks for this
    Jason

  8. Hi Gary i use your plugin in all my sites and it works like a charme in all sites except one where “allow_url_fopen” is disabled. Is it possible to make a cURL version instead of a_u_fopen? Thank you very much

    1. Automatic Updater uses WordPress’ internal functions in order to check for and download updates – are you able to install the updates using the normal “Update Now” button?

  10. As someone who implores my clients to update their flumping WordPress installations to deaf ears, this little plugin is the tops! Now all of their creaky old installs smell like that new WordPress install smell and will continue to despite their seeming inability to press the update button.

    BOSS!

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