Disable automatic activation

Have you tried Mark Jaquith’s plugin that puts manual control on JetPack automatic activation?

I haven’t tried, because there is no guarantee, it will work if Jetpack changes the code of automatic activation.

And it has problems as well, as the notification bubble stays in the menu item.

I can not “try” plugins, as all sites are live. Just imagine if I set it for all my clients and something will change and I need to change manually again all the sites. Nonsense!

I think everybody (except Automattic – why???) agree, that the automatic activation is a bad idea, as it activates functions on your site, that you haven’t accepted or permitted or you didn’t want.

And it makes a WP install getting slower and slower, because unnecessary modules are running.

So the only solution is if Jetpack disables by default the automatic activation and people can change this default setting if they want to.

Mark Jaquith’s plugin is indeed the way to go in this case, as @pothi Kalimuthu pointed out.

We’re aware that deactivating Jetpack modules can be hard: while Jetpack’s Interface worked well when it included 8 modules, it now includes 26 of them. We’re currently working on updating the interface to make managing active and inactive modules mush easier.

As per your main concern, we try to stick to WordPress’s core philosophy as much as possible. In this case, we chose to make a decision for the users, instead of providing one more option.

Matt Mullenweg talked about it a bit more in the comments of this post. Do not hesitate to browse through his comments to learn more about the goals of Jetpack.

Oh my god, one of the most stupid comment and it is from Matt??? I can’t believe it…

Matt: “Presumably if someone didn’t want the new features, they wouldn’t be motivated to upgrade.”

It is from the post you linked. Even Mark Jaquith had to react for this sentence.

Do you really think it is the “good” way? Isn’t it strange, that most developers and users don’t agree?

In this case, we chose to make a decision for the users, instead of providing one more option.

Every time I upgrade Jetpack, I have to disable the new feature, which makes me upset and it is indeed a one more “option” and it is indeed not the user’s benefit.

I guess there is no chance to make you disable automatic activation, but it doesn’t mean you are right. You are big and you have the power to force your decision to users. Unacceptable.

Oh my god, one of the most stupid comment

While it may be the most stupid thing ever for you, other Jetpack users might find it logical that new features are immediately available when updating.

As I mentioned before, we did choose to make that decision for the users instead of introducing another option to the plugin, much like it’s done for some of the core WordPress options that are sometimes removed. See #21307 and #21509 for 2 recent examples.

I understand your frustration though; in your case it would be better if new features were not automatically activated.
Luckily, there are quite a few solutions out there if you’re not satisfied with Jetpack’s default behaviour:

• You can use the Manual Control plugin, or develop your own plugin. Other users have already reported the Notifications problem to the plugin, and some of them shared a solution to the problem here. You could apply the fix they proposed, or propose a patch to Mark Jaquith to fix this issue.
• You can edit Jetpack’s core files to deactivate the automatic activation. I wouldn’t recommend it though, since your changes would be overwritten with each plugin update. An alternative would be to fork the plugin and install a modified version of Jetpack on your clients’ sites.
• You could enable Jetpack’s Development mode, thus deactivating all modules by default. That’s a good solution if you don’t use any Jetpack modules that actually require a WordPress.com connection.

I hope you can find a satisfying solution among these.

Thank you for your support and answers Jeremy! I really hope, I can find a solution for this, because Jetpack has really awesome features on board, that I like to give to my clients.

My opinion and judgement is not about the new features, it’s about the idea, that a plugin upgrade is only motivated because of the new features. Jetpack’s new versions are fixing bugs and making the existing features more polished or stable. This is the first reason to upgrade Jetpack plugin or any plugin.

So if somebody (even if he is Matt) says, that a plugin upgrade is only for the new features, it is not a good advice. I think, you can agree with me in this.

Can you say, that it is safe to use Manual Control Plugin? I mean future proof? Because I have to care about hundreds of client websites.

I have my own plugin now, which I use for custom css, social sharing, shortcodes, etc. But it would be good to use a plugin, which does the same or even better and more.

Can you say, that it is safe to use Manual Control Plugin? I mean future proof?

I’m not familiar with the plugin’s code, but we do not have any plans to change how the module activation works in the near future.
If it were to happen, I’m sure that Manual Control could be updated to handle the changes!