New to the community? Start here

[The Hub] Update “monthly” option for Auto Update

2

Sometimes or rarely, latest updates of WP, themes, and plugins have small issues/bugs which might break the functionality of a site.

If auto update run weekly, the update might trigger some errors if the update itself is buggy. To prevent this, update monthly option could add some more time to plugin/theme developers to fix it.

ManageWP has no immediate plan to offer auto update monthly feature.

BlogVault already has this option.

WPMUDEV allows either everyday or every week, but I’d like to see monthly auto update feature, too.

Wed, 10 Aug 2022 3:39:27
More The Hub discussions
The Hub
  • Tony G
    • Mr. LetsFixTheWorld

    This feature was approved by DEV at least two years ago. On the face of it, it’s a good suggestion, but there is a flaw in the suggested implementation.

    Consider : An update comes out on August 9th. The world almost ends due to a bug which is fixed four days later. But you’re only updating monthly, maybe on the 1st of each month. So you avoid the catastrophe. YAY!

    But what if the update comes out on August 29th. The world till goes to hell. It still takes four days to patch. But you get the unpatched update on the 1st. BEWM! Your scheduled automated update runs on the 1st, five minutes before the patch is released. Now you’re sitting with an issue for another month. OUCH!

    The better solution here is to delay updates for some number of days since the last update – rather than scheduling a longer period of time between our attempts to update.
    Let’s run through the above scenario with this…

    August 29th the bad update gets published. Your system is on delay for 5 days, so it’s scheduled to update on September 2nd. They release a patch on September 1st. It has another bug! OUCH! But when the release is published, your update is rescheduled for 5 days after that. YAY! They issue another bad patch (developers were losing sleep and got sloppy OOPS!) … but you’re still OK because your site won’t get the update until they are stable for 5 days!

    “But what if 5 days isn’t enough? What if it takes 6 days to patch?”

    That’s the game, right? This tells us Automate needs to have an option so that each of us can set for ourselves the number of days that we want to gamble. If we wait longer, we might run with a security issue that was already patched. If we only wait three days we might update before a patch is available and lose the benefit of this protocol. The answer is, no one knows, so WPMU DEV should Not define their own hard-coded expectations, hopes, idealism, or pessimism. The delay should be left to us.

    So, in this thread from over two years ago, James confirms that the feature was approved. Unfortunately it’s still on the backlog.

    Coming back to an old mantra of mine here, personally I’d prefer that the approval to update a plugin should be implemented with a webhook. That is, when Automate is going to update a plugin, invoke a webhook, or make an informational record available via an API query. We can then process that and decide for ourselves how we want to determine if a plugin is ready for update. For example, I might write code that checks the number of wordpress.org support requests for the last week to see if it’s increased more than 20% over the count of the week prior. That would return a False response – do not update the plugin – and trigger an email to someone to look at what’s happening with that plugin so that we can determine for ourselves what to do.

    So once again we’ve been waiting for years for DEV to implement something that will probably still make a lot of people unhappy, when they could take the simple route, which is actually much more powerful, and get better solutions to us much faster. Unfortunately this concept of an API is also backlogged into next year. OK, OK … we must have patience for our valued provider here.