In this quick tips work­flow arti­cle, you’re going to learn how to auto­mat­i­cally upgrade your word­press plu­g­ins and why. Thanks to Word­Press 2.7 and recent updates and enhance­ments, Word­Press offers the abil­ity to “Upgrade Auto­mat­i­cally” both your plu­g­ins and your Word­Press Install.

Read the arti­cle, or  scroll down and watch the video, do the steps, and when fin­ished make sure to leave a com­ment below with your feed­back and suggestions.

Image by Eva Patri­cia

Why Should I Care?

When you install plu­g­ins things can get tricky or messy.  Some­times plu­g­ins con­flict, or bugs are found that need to be fixed.  Thanks to the open nature of Word­Press, plu­g­ins can be devel­oped rather fast to meet any need or desire.  Some­times a demand is so great, that the plu­gin gets released a lit­tle early and can have a few pesky bugs that need to get squashed.

Secu­rity is another rea­son.  When new code comes out, “unscrupu­lous”  indi­vid­u­als can take advan­tage of exploits and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in the code of plu­g­ins and more eas­ily be able to “take you out” and take your web­site down. Lastly, if added sta­bil­ity and secu­rity wasn’t enough, many plu­g­ins con­tain new fea­tures, enhance­ments, and work­flow improve­ments.

How Does It Work?

Thanks to the “Upgrade Auto­mat­i­cally” fea­ture, when you login to your dash­board under plu­g­ins you will see a num­ber, that means a new update is avail­able for your plu­gin. All that’s left to do is click the but­ton that says “Upgrade Auto­mat­i­cally” and all is done.  Let me show you step by step.

Alright, I’m Sold! Walk Me Through it!

1.) First login to your dash­board, look for the sec­tion titled “Plu­g­ins” (under appear­ance) and you should see a num­ber.  If you don’t that means every­thing is up to date. Let’s assume atleast one plu­gin is out of date (and hope 20+ are not!). You will see some­thing under­neath the plu­gin that needs updated that looks like the fol­low­ing: 2.) Click the “Upgrade Auto­mat­i­cally” link, next you will see a screen that looks like the fol­low­ing: 3.) What you need to do is put in your host­name (usu­ally the domain)  then input your FTP login and Pass­word ( as well as check­ing FTP for con­nec­tion type), then click “Pro­ceed”. 4.) You will see some­thing like the above pic­ture.  Wait until you see plu­gin reac­ti­vated suc­cess­fully before you leave the page, oth­er­wise the process may not complete.

Cool Now What?

Now you need to go ahead and update any other plu­g­ins that are dis­play­ing this option.  Some plu­g­ins are not sup­ported by this plu­gin and you will have to update them man­u­ally (by down­load­ing the lat­est ver­sion of the plu­gin .zip file,  decom­press, and upload­ing it to your web­site via FTP in the plu­g­ins direc­tory and over­write the old files).

Hey, Umm, I Keep Get­ting A Write Error?

Ahh, in that case what you need to do is login to your host­ing account via FTP.  Browse to your plu­g­ins direc­tory, and do a CHMOD.  (you do this by right click­ing the plu­g­ins folder and chang­ing the per­mis­sions). You can change the per­mis­sions to 666 or 755.  If for what­ever rea­son those 2 don’t work out for you, you need to change it to 777.

How­ever, I highly rec­om­mend that after you com­plete this tuto­r­ial and have updated every­thing to change the per­mis­sions back to what they were pre­vi­ously set at. Mean­ing each time you need to upgrade your plu­g­ins, you need to login with your FTP pro­gram, tem­porar­ily change the per­mis­sions to 777, and then change them back after you update all the plugins.

Video Overview of Auto­mat­i­cally Upgrad­ing Word­Press Plugins

Con­clu­sion

In this train­ing, we went over why you should update your plu­g­ins, and you learned step-by-step how to do it.  Now I need you to take ACTION and take about 5 min­utes to upgrade your plu­g­ins and get this han­dled.  Make sure to leave a com­ment below let­ting me know if this helped you and if you would like to see more work­flow ori­ented videos.  Talk soon…

Tagged as: WordPress, Workflow