The news is being breathlessly announced in numerous news items like this one, and this one. WordPress 5.5 will add the the long-awaited, eagerly-anticipated ability to auto-update plugins and themes! Yea!
Thing is, this isn’t new. The functionality to auto-update themes and plugins has long-existed, and I’ve been using it since early 2017. Configuring auto-updates is easy-breezy. I make a small addition to my child theme functions.php file, or better yet to my custom plugin.
So, this is an incremental enhancement, not a major new thing. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a good enhancement. I’m glad the great people at WP are doing this. I will be able to enable plugin and theme auto-updates right from my admin dashboard, not having to mess with my custom plugin at all, so it will be even easier-breezier.
More important is granularity. The custom plugin method of auto-updating is all-or-nothing. The new enhancement will allow me to select auto or manual update for each individual theme and plugin. For me, at least initially, this won’t matter much as I will most likely select to auto-update everything. But if a plugin update ever breaks my site – or if I suspect it might – I will be able to selectively switch that one plugin to manual. The rest will still auto-update.
This is good stuff. Just that breathlessly announcing an incremental enhancement as though it’s a major, ground-breaking, deal-changing new thing seems kinda silly.
Update: My sites auto-updated to WP 5.4, but not really. I still have to login as administrator to each site to OK updating the database.
Kinda defeats the purpose of auto-updating.
