Donncha: WordPress Upgrade Notifications by Email

This weekend will go down in history. It’s the first time I’ve been seriously sick in well over 5 years. A bug infected my son on Wednesday, but he got over it quickly enough. Then the same bug hit my wife and I on Sunday morning and we’re just getting over it now.

Odd that a worm attacks software I work on and I get very sick at the same time. Unfortunately I couldn’t run an exploit scanner and remove the bug but my body’s defenses took care of the bugs eventually.

All this leads me to a handy little plugin called Upgrade Notification by Email written by Konrad Karpieszuk. Install it on your blogs and it will check once a day if a new version of WordPress is out. When that happens it will email the admin with a message saying the blog must be upgraded.

It’s odd that the plugin itself contacts WordPress.org instead of relying on the built-in version checker but it’s only one request a day.

What I’d like to see next is a direct link to the upgrade page on the blog.

Far more challenging would be a plugin to auto upgrade a blog. In case a theme or plugin breaks things the plugin should probably deactivate all plugins and change the theme back to the default theme. Once the upgrade is complete, all plugins should be reactivated and the theme too. The admin has to be emailed before and after the upgrade.

It’s easy to say what it should do, but doing it is another thing altogether. The reactivation process has to be sandboxed in case of failure so the plugin doesn’t die. The plugins page already does this so at least there’s example code to work from. Anyone up for coding it?

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