A big new feature coming in WordPress 5.5

Announced earlier this year by developers of WordPress is a feature that’s been desperately needed as standard for years. Automated plugin updates are finally coming to the core of WordPress as of version 5.5. Right now the feature is available as a separate plugin to add to sites.

While we’ve no doubt this is a huge boost for the WordPress ecosystem in general (remember falling behind on updates is a huge security problem) we won’t actually be deploying this one our WordPress hosting platform. For the foreseeable future the 34SP.com in house update system will supersede the built in feature in 5.5.

Here’s why!

• Our update process runs independently from your hosted WordPress site. This means we are able to process the updates without affecting performance, or relying on a WordPress pseudo cron.
• We can update regardless of the current state of your WordPress site. If a plugin or theme is causing an error, we can still run the update*.
• Our in-house system offers far more granular control. We can specify update delays – allowing a pause of X days after update has come out. This can be used to allow for plugins making mistakes, or for testing on staging first.
• Developers can hook into our own system to run processes after an update.
• We log all the updates, allowing for easier debugging.
• We allow configuration of how you are notified and who is notified after updates.

Our system will still run in the background after version 5.5 releases, though we will adopt the new interface from the WordPress core update system – hey it’s prettier – so you get the best of both worlds!

* this might not be possible in certain edge case scenarios with premium plugins