How to truly automate wordpress/plugin/theme updates

I haven’t seen too much of this out there. The general design of WordPress, IMO, seems to go with the idea of having someone present to do the updates, since updates can break your site. Especially with updates like the forthcoming WordPress 3.2, which if you don’t have PHP 5.2 and MySQL 5, your site will be incapacitated — you wouldn’t want to do a true auto-update to that without first making sure the requirements are met.

I guess wordpress isn’t quite as ready to be anything more than a hobbyists tool, then? I know, it’s used by serious professionals all over, but really, if everyone who ran a blog at bigcompany.com had to do their own maintenance continually, it probably wouldn’t work to well. MU is a great idea, but it doesn’t extend to heterogeneous installations.

Well, there are plenty of large website installs using WordPress. A number of universities (including mine), WordPress.com (with millions of blogs), and a variety of others. WordPress.com VIP also has a number of high profile news organizations using WordPress.

I wouldn’t call it a hobbyist tool by any means. *Any* software you install, especially at a scale of hundreds, thousands, or millions of blogs/sites is going to require more effort than a cron job. It is going to require dedicated systems folks to maintain it.

And I know for certain at plenty of big sites (especially universities), they most certainly do NOT want anything like updates to happen automagically in the background like that, mostly because of custom setups and wanting to test any changes before they go into production. Especially with UI changes – people want warnings before it’s rolled out wholesale.

Most major companies actually turn OFF auto-updates on things like webservers too, speaking as someone who works for one and attends copious cross-company meetings about WHY we’re always behind the curve with versioning.

Right, so it is being done somehow, somewhere, yet I can’t find any info on how to do it.

Lest you think my plan is to blindly update a live production site automatically, I’ll ask you to think again. That’s why I have 4 levels of sites: development, testing, staging and then production. I wasn’t thinking about just blindly updating my production sites.

So rather than just assuming I don’t know what I’m doing perhaps someone can actually provide some info?

Every single person I know of that have a development site staging and live, does the dev site via svn.

And they still svn up.

Ah, now that is useful. I did not know about the svn option. Thank you. Is that available for plug-ins and themes as well, or just wp itself?

All plugins in the repo have an svn. That’s how they get there.

It’s still not as automatic as you were looking for.

edit: but yeah, you can set a cron job to svn up.

and then i ran across this: https://managewp.com/

tamouse – What managewp does is exactly the same as what WordPress.com does, and that is called ‘Managed blog hosting.’

If you don’t want to be in charge of anything other than your content, that very much IS the way to do.

If you want to know exactly what you’re doing, you do what everyone else here on www.remarpro.com does, and that is self host.

There’s nothing wrong with either approach, please understand that! In fact, I often send people to WP.com because the work involved for self-hosting is either beyond their ability or just something they don’t want to do. BUT. With managed blog hosting you will LOOSE the freedoms you have on self-hosting to do anything you want.

I have two levels of testing (6 at work, I know exactly what you mean). None of them are automagically updated. I always take the time to do it manually. Once I know it’s good, then I push my re-wrapped package out. I’m an automation specialist ??

If I WANTED to svn/cron up my sites, though, I’d start here: https://simpledream.net/2010/10/19/wordpress-auto-updates-svn/

ETA: Or Otto ??

You may find this useful reading.

https://ottopress.com/2011/creating-a-wordpress-site-using-svn/

@ipstenu: where do you get the impression that managewp is about managed hosting wp sites? From what I read, you download a plugin to your site and then add it to your managewp dashboard, and it takes care of things from there. No where obvious do they mention hosting wp sites themselves…

Also, I am self-hosting these various sites, some on a VPS, others elsewhere where their actual owners want them. That is really the whole point of this, to make my life easier without having to visit each dev/test/stage site and run the so-called auto-update on each site individually (that’s 3 times for just one particular blog!) I’ve been thinking about how to do this, and I can probably cut it to once per blog, and use other means to get things to the test/stage/production sites.

Still, it’s aggravating to think about how to do this when there are so many interlocking pieces. How to automatically disable plug-ins during a wp update, how to reactivate plug-ins after they’ve been updated, configuring plug-ins if changes are needed, etc.

Perhaps a cron job is too much; that isn’t really necessarily what I’m after, and is sort of a red-herring. What I want and need though is an automated way of updating all the various blog sites in one go, pushbutton is fine. Just svn upping the site isn’t quite enough, still need to do the other things I mentioned above. I’m thinking about implementing something using CruiseControl and ControlTier for this sort of thing, which have been a real help in previous situations. If it was just some files to worry about, that’d be okay, but having to worry about some of the database settings brings up a whole raft of issues.

Thanks for the input, though, this has helped me think this through a bit more.

tamouse – the fact that they have a SEPARATE page for ‘self hosted’ is what tells me that’s a managed tool: https://managewp.com/self-hosted

Besides, now you’re giving a third-party app access to FTP to your site? Hells bells no! That’s a security nightmare waiting to happen ?? not to mention what if they get out of sync or behind or whatnot. Or if they upgrade a plugin, it conflicts, you need to back out… how does all that get handled?

Still, it’s aggravating to think about how to do this when there are so many interlocking pieces. How to automatically disable plug-ins during a wp update, how to reactivate plug-ins after they’ve been updated, configuring plug-ins if changes are needed, etc.

And that is WHY you don’t automate this stuff. Everyone’s site is different. Your solution likely won’t be mine, or Andrea’s, or Otto’s. There are too many moving parts to have a default blind upgrade for MOST people.

Oh, Otto, thank you so much. That answers a lot of questions. It doesn’t deal with the notion of deactivating/reactivating/configuring plug-ins as necessary, but what’s there makes a whole lot of sense.