Single Click Plugin Updater WordPress Plugin
This plugin extends the plugin update notification feature introduced in WordPress 2.3 by adding an “update automatically” link to update notifications. When you click the link, the new version of the corresponding plugin is downloaded and installed automatically. It also lets you know which plugins have update notifications enabled.
Update 06.04.2008 : Version 2.0.1 with much more features is out. More info here.
Download it now! (37 Kb)
How It Works (In Detail)
To be able to display the new link this plugin will hide the original update notification and display a slightly modified one. Here’s what happens when you click the “update automatically” link :
- If the plugin that needs to be updated is active, it is deactivated.
- The Plugin Updater retrieves the plugin’s page from Wordpress.org and finds the download link.
- The new version is downloaded and extracted to the wp-content/plugins directory (this directory must be writable by the Updater plugin).
- If necessary, the updated plugin is re-activated.
All this happens in the background, so if everything works OK you’ll end up back at the “Plugins” tab. If there are any errors the plugin will display an error message and abort the upgrade.
Requirements
- WordPress 2.3 or newer.
- CURL library installed or allow_url_fopen enabled in php.ini. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry - at least one of these is available on most webservers by default.
- The /plugins directory must be writable by WordPress. The exact file permissions depend on the server configuration. Read more about file permissions. 666 or 755 may be sufficient, and 777 will always work, though this is not recommended due to security risks.
The plugin has been tested and works under Firefox 2.x, Opera 9.x and, as of version 1.0.5, Internet Explorer.
Installation
To install the plugin, please follow these steps:
- Download the one-click-plugin-updater.zip file (below) to your computer.
- Unzip the file.
- Upload “one-click-plugin-updater” folder to the “/wp-content/plugins/” directory.
- Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
That’s it.
Download
one-click-plugin-updater.zip (40 Kb)
February 24th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
Help, every time I try to use this plugin I get this error message:
Error : couldn’t unzip the new version of the plugin.
Your server may not have ziplib installed and the unzip command doesn’t work either.
What do I need to do to get it to work.
Willing to pay for help. Thanks!
February 22nd, 2008 at 12:43 pm
I think there’s something in the .htaccess rules that blocks it. My guess would be that one of the plugins you installed modified .htaccess to block all/most access to the “wp-content/plugins” directory, or something similar. It might have added a new .htaccess file in one of those directories as well.
If you don’t find anything wrong with the .htaccess files, maybe it’s in the URL rewrite rules that are stored in the database. Though I’m not sure how to check those, not off the top of my head.
February 22nd, 2008 at 9:35 am
Hi, I added about 20 new plugins, and one of them is conflicting with One Click Plugin Updater. Now when I click “update automatically”, I get:
I’ve used Firebug in Firefox and IE Developer Toolbar in IE, trying to see what’s causing the conflict, but neither enable me to see what plugins or scripts or causing the bug.
Do you know how I can find the culprit? I de-activated all the new plugins. The problem still exists.
(Aside: Also some images no longer display on my blog (post-ratings’ stars, translator’s flags.)
After contending with these problems, I found you have just released a new version. I installed it. As expected, that made no difference to the problem another plugin(s) is causing.
February 21st, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Fantastic. Works fine. Thanks a lot.
February 21st, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Just to let you know, the new version is up and seems to be working.
February 20th, 2008 at 11:17 pm
Thanks a lot White Shadow.
February 20th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
ah, thats why… aren’t the WP guys aware that your and a few more plugs are affected by toying around with the server structure? hmmmmpf….
well, take your time and good luck!
February 20th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Apparently WordPress.org is going through some kind of restructuring - some download links have changed, some just don’t work at all.
I’m already working to make this plugin conform with those changes, but you will need to update it (the single click updater) manually when I get the new version up. The old version simply won’t be able to do it automatically because the wordpress.org page structure is now different.
February 20th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
This plugin was working 3 days ago. Not anymore. I’m puzzled.
-
Here’s one error I got:
“Error : couldn’t download the new version from ‘http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/all-in-one-seo-pack.zip’!
You need either the CURL library installed or allow_url_fopen set in php.ini for this to work.
-
A second error is that it tells me that it was not possible to download the plugin (to be updated).
-
Here’s what my web server tells me: “We have not made any
changes to the server but Curl is already installed and working on the server:”
-
Puzzling. Do you have any thought on that?
February 18th, 2008 at 2:10 am
No. It’s safer to simply overwrite the existing files *if* new files are downloaded successfully.
February 18th, 2008 at 1:46 am
Shouldn’t this plugin updater first delete the plugin to update and then upload the new plugin files?
February 16th, 2008 at 9:07 am
WOW! Excellent! This should be included with wp already, thanks.
February 13th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
[...] project which attempts to generalise the one click update of WordPress plugins. It is called the One click plugin updater. This tries to add this facility to existing plugins. From the comments on the plugin page it looks [...]
February 11th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
[...] along comes the One-Click Updater plugin developed by W-Shaow. As you can see below, once installed you simply click the “update automatically” link [...]
February 11th, 2008 at 2:03 am
[...] One Click Plugin Updater: تحديث الإضافات المثبته في مدونتك بضغطة زر [...]
January 11th, 2008 at 3:55 am
Okay, thanks White Shadow!
Thomas
January 10th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Hey Thomas,
This is a known issue - it happens when the new version of a plugin has a different directory structure than the old one. There’s no way to safely fix this right now, so I suggest you deactivate the old version and activate the new plugin. Then you could manually delete the old version from your plugin folder.
By the way, this should only happen for some very specific plugins, not all of them.
January 10th, 2008 at 8:35 am
Love this plugin. It works great, but for some reason, it has been installing the newer versions of plugins and leaving the old versions in the plugin list. Please help.
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:39 pm
[...] One Click Plugin Updater [...]
January 2nd, 2008 at 11:01 pm
[...] Single Click Plugin Updater - A very handy plugin that extends the plugin notification system, introduced in WordPress version 2.3. This plugin also provides an ‘update now’ link that, when clicked, will automatically download and install the new version on your blog. [...]
December 22nd, 2007 at 4:12 pm
[...] This plugin. This plugin is called the “One Click Plugin Updater”. Once installed and activated, and provided you’re using the most recent version of WordPress - all you need to do is visit your plugins page every now and again and scroll to see which plugins need to be updated, click to “update automatically” and that’s IT. How much easier could it get? There are a few plugins, unfortunately, that aren’t loaded into the plugins directory in such a way that they update automatically. Those need to be updated manually (and you’ll know, because the “update automatically” prompt will not go away). Other than those - it is a sweet little plugin and it will make your blogging life just a little bit easier! [...]
December 17th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Danny : the two plugins have very different architectures, so they probably won’t be completely merged. There might be a version of Oneclick installer that includes my plugin, but there will also always be a standalone version of the single click updater available.
Steven : That’s good. I hope I’ll be able to at least partially avoid the file permission hassle in a future version - Anirudh, the author of Oneclick installer, gave me an idea about that…
December 17th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
Setting the permissions of the plugin to be updated worked.
December 17th, 2007 at 7:12 am
I haven’t tried the one-click installer in a while (since right after the plugin competition) but it never worked with the simplicity, power, and effectiveness of the single click plugin updater. So, I would love to see these two plugins work together, but what I’d like to see is the single-click updater influence the one-click installer. That, or keep them separate.
That’s just me.
December 17th, 2007 at 1:48 am
[...] Wordpress Automatic Upgrade que actualiza el WordPress en unos 5 o 6 clics desde el administrador y One Click Plugin Updater que actualiza plugins de la misma [...]
December 16th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
Email sent.
December 16th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
Hi, I’m the author of OneClick installer (http://anirudhsanjeev.org/oneclick/), the next version of oneclick will incorporate this along with many new features. Would you be interested in merging the code or the projects and/or contributing to development?
email me at anirudh $at$ anirudhsanjeev $dot$ org
December 15th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
Have you tried setting the target plugin’s directory and/or files to 777? I know it’s not very secure, but if it works then, we can at least be sure it’s a file permission issue.
December 15th, 2007 at 1:25 am
It executes now, but the plugin is not updated after it executes. Below the plugin there is still a notification that the plugin is not up to date.
December 14th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
I see that for some reason it couldn’t find the system’s temp folder, so it tried to use the plugins own folder to store the temporary file, which worked because you changed the permissions. So, problem solved
(more or less; you can set “debug” to false again.)
I’ll check if I can do anything about it failing to locate the system-wide temp. directory. I have edited the log you posted to only leave in the important parts - this page is getting very large…