Enemy of Entropy

Whoops! WordPress Plugin Update Issue

13 April 2008, 8:47 pm. 6 Comments. Filed under Blogging, Geekery.

One of the neat things about Word­Press 2.5 is that when a plu­gin that’s in the Word­Press Plu­gin Direc­tory is updated, you get a mes­sage ask­ing if you want to down­load the new ver­sion or upgrade auto­mat­i­cally. If you use the auto­matic option, Word­Press down­loads the new ver­sion, deletes the old one, unzips the down­loaded file, and reac­ti­vates the plu­gin. It’s mar­velously sim­ple, com­pared to down­load­ing, unzip­ping, delet­ing, upload­ing, and reac­ti­vat­ing things man­u­ally. Until last night, it worked beau­ti­fully.

I try to check the plu­g­ins on this blog every day or three, to see if they need to be updated. I was sur­prised to see notices on many of them last night, so I started going through the auto­matic upgrade process.

One of the plu­g­ins I always use, No Dupli­cate Com­ments, is pretty old, but it does what it’s sup­posed to do. I didn’t think too much of it when I saw the upgrade mes­sage. But when I got back to the list of plu­g­ins, NDC was gone, and I had a com­pletely unfa­mil­iar plu­gin, Hide/​Cut Post Text installed. The most recent ver­sion of that plu­gin is dated 8 April 2005.

Another update installed WP-​​Banner, a plu­gin I’m aware of but not one that I use. It was updated 11 April 2008. I haven’t yet fig­ured out what it replaced, which is annoying.

I still have update mes­sages for Democ­racy (just the wid­get, not the actual plu­gin, which is even odder), last updated 23 March 2007, and the Cys­tats unin­staller. The Cys­tats “upgrade” took me back­wards, from the 0.9.1 ver­sion that I was using to the 0.9.0 ver­sion that was released 10 Decem­ber 2007.

I sup­pose I’m back to man­u­ally updat­ing plu­g­ins for a time! I’m try­ing to fig­ure out just how I should let the WP folks know about this prob­lem. Update: I posted to the sup­port forum, then the mod­er­a­tor asked me to report it as a site bug.

6 Comments »

  1. avatar Trisha. 14 April 2008, 5:43 pm

    I didn’t even know it could auto­mat­i­cally update the plu­g­ins! I don’t think I have my per­mis­sions set in a way to allow it though. I can’t edit files through the dashboard.

    That’s pretty bad that its installing things you didn’t want. I’ll just con­tinue doing it man­u­ally too!

  2. avatar cyn. 15 April 2008, 5:24 pm

    It isn’t fully auto­matic, how­ever you do it — but the fea­ture is great when it works prop­erly :-)

  3. avatar Kian Ann. 23 April 2008, 11:04 pm

    Did you have issues with the plu­gin per­mis­sions after you have updated it with the auto­matic upgrade? Now I can’t delete the plu­gin from my FTP program!

  4. avatar cyn. 24 April 2008, 12:00 am

    No, I didn’t have that prob­lem. Have you tried to change the per­mis­sions via FTP?

  5. avatar Kian Ann. 24 April 2008, 1:30 pm

    Yep, I didn’t have per­mis­sions to even browse the folder, let alone change its per­mis­sions. :) I guess i’ll have to get the web­host­ing com­pany to get it deleted for me. Heh :mrgreen:

  6. avatar cyn. 24 April 2008, 8:22 pm

    Odd. You can’t change the direc­tory per­mis­sions, either?

    I’ve had to have our host­ing peo­ple delete a bad theme in the past, but I don’t think I’ve had to ask them for help with a plugin.

 

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