Whoops! WordPress Plugin Update Issue

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.