In this video you'll explore the different ways to update WordPress plugins and themes how you can be
notified of plug in and theme update availability and some quick fixes in case something's not working.
After an update because plugins and themes are the responsibility of the author and developer and are
generally works in progress it makes sense that by updating you could potentially introduce incompatibilities
or other errors.
Still it's best to update as soon as there's a new version available.
For security reasons but having a quick restore available makes it painless to keep everything updated
properly.
The first thing I'll do and suggest that you do also is go back into our WordPress dashboard at the
fire weed photography or our local installation or the server installation that we had been working
on before.
Here I am on the Welcome to WordPress 4.6 page.
After doing an update of the word press corps files from the last video I can still see that I have
14 updates available.
If I roll over this arrow here it says 10 plugin updates for theme updates.
Now as I said before plugin updates can be very important especially for security reasons.
You should get a notification on your dashboard here and sometimes via email if you're monitoring security
for your web sites in other ways.
We'll talk about monitoring security for multiple Web sites for yours and client sites in a future video.
But for now let's talk about updating plugins and the different ways that you can do so.
First let's talk about updating plugins individually.
If you roll over the plugins area and just click installed plugins that will show you all your plug
ins and you can see via a color indication which plugins are due for an update.
You can see there's a yellow and orange indicator here under each of the plug ins that are due for an
update whether they're active or not on the Web site.
First thing I'll do is just go down to one of the plug ins I have that's due for an update and if you
click here under details it will open a modal window where you can look at what's been updated in the
latest version.
So this plug in version 5.4 9 for all in one WP migration has been tested up to 4.6.
So now that I have version 4.6 installed of Wordpress I can go ahead and feel comfortable updating this
plugin so I can update just this plugin by going over here and clicking update now you'll see that it'll
show an updating rotating set of arrows and when it's finished it'll give me a success message.
I often like going in and updating plugins one at a time like this because I can go back and check the
functionality of the site after updating each plugin especially those that I suspect might have a functionality
error or a conflict when I make my update.
For now that was just a backup and migrations plug in.
So I'm not too worried about it now.
If I update the code snippets plug in for example I just hit update now and let it update.
If I have any code active on my website I go and check the functionality of that code right away and
make sure as I refresh the web page that everything that I have custom coded is working well.
Now what if I update a plug in and it breaks the website.
Or even worse yet gives me the white screen of death where I can't even get in to my wordpress dashboard.
What can you do.
And I hope you're thinking oh that's easy Greg.
We learned that in a previous chapter where we broke a Web site and restored it by renaming the plugin
file folder thereby deactivating a plug in and getting back into the Wordpress dashboard to deal with
our errors.
And that would be correct.
So here in my local environment I don't need to log in via FCP but I can go into the Windows Explorer
and look at my WP content folder and my plugins folder and I can look at the plug ins folders that are
there that I can rename and deactivate manually try that on your own site.
Pass the video now and choose an active plug in that you can deactivate manually by going into the file
structure either via FCP inside of the site Ground file manager via the see panel or using Windows Explorer
or the finder on a Mac I hope that went well for you.
I'm going to choose the all in one W.P. migration plugin just to do my deactivation test because I know
it's an activated plug in on this Web site and since it's my local development environment is easy for
me to go in with Windows Explorer and find my file structure.
So inside of Windows Explorer I know that in my local development environment it's under Seacole and
under the map folder and if I look under H.T. docs I have the live Desch site site which is the one
that I'm working on here.
You can see in the U R L It's right there open up windows explorer one more time inside W.P. content.
I have my plug ins folder and there's the all in one W.P. migration folder that contains the plug and
files.
So I've clicked a second time to highlight the name of the plug in and I'm just going to type Dasch
rename and that'll deactivate the plug in for me.
So if I go back into the Wordpress dashboard I'm on the plugins page I can just refresh the page and
you can see that the plug in will become deactivated.
Here it is here it's showing it inside the database but it shows me an error.
It's been deactivated due to an error.
The plugin file does not exist.
That just means that it's looking for it under the original name and it can't find it.
So it's deactivated this plug in.
And if that were causing the problem if my site had gone down or something I couldn't restore my wordpress
dashboard and my web site I just manually deactivating that in.
So I'll just quickly go back and re activate this.
Now if I if I rename it to the original name and then I go back and refresh the page again it doesn't
automatically reactivate the plug.
You have to do that through the Wordpress dashboard so I can leave that plug in de-activated and try
to mitigate the problem.
If it's the one causing the problem but I know it wasn't so I can re-activated again if I want to.
Now another way to update your plugins is to go under dashboard to the updates page and this shows you
all the updates including WordPress core plug in files as well as themed files down at the bottom.
So I can see that I have all of these plug ins that are scheduled to be updated and if I want to I can
select them in a group or I can even click select all which will check all the boxes and I can click
Update plugins.
Now this could take a little bit of time depending on how large the plug ins are and how fast the server
is and how many you have a pause the video now and let the update finish.
As you can see I have a nice complete report after all of my plugin updates and a green line for each
of the ones that successfully updated.
Hopefully you'll have each of them update successfully for you.
You can see that it gives you a report at the top that it is enabling a maintenance mode and that's
basically a white screen with some black copy on the live Web site that says maintenance mode is in
progress.
Please check back later.
And then at the bottom it disabled maintenance mode and all updates have been completed.
You can return to the plugins page or return to the Wordpress updates page.
But sometimes because this takes a little while.
I'd rather do each plug in individually and periodically test the Web site to make sure that there's
no conflicts during the process instead of doing a super large update all at once.
Another issue potentially is that the longer you wait over time the more plug ins need updates and the
more chance you have of a conflict between two plug ins or between a version of Wordpress and the plug
in that you're updating.
I like to update plug ins as often as possible and is convenient.
And then the next video will talk about ways to monitor multiple sites from one dashboard like here.
The one I use is managed W.P..
In any case let's return to the Wordpress updates page and we can look at what's left and I can see
that I do have the latest version of Wordpress under plug ins.
It says that all plug ins are up to date and it shows that I have four themes ready for an update.
Now let's talk about themes.
I have three default WordPress themes that came with my wordpress installation originally that are here
and I know I'm not going to be using it all.
So instead of clogging up my web site and my file structure and database with themes that I don't need
I'll often go ahead and delete these themes when they're ready for an update and they're giving me that
little nag message up here or up here.
And so what I'll do is go under appearance and themes and unfortunately it still takes a couple of clicks
to delete themes that you don't need.
But here's how it's done.
I'll just go here and click theme details.
And once it shows me the big detail screen I can click delete and I have to confirm that I want to delete
that theme takes just a couple of seconds.
And there we go.
So I go into each of these themes that is not active and that I don't need and I'll make these three
clicks per theme just to delete them out of my system the details delete and OK
great.
Now what's left we could see under our theme screen that I have the original manual child theme that
we created in one of our previous chapters and we have another child theme that we created using the
plug in right here and that is the active theme.
And I have the parent theme called affinity which has a new version available.
Now here's where updating our themes is important and it's just good to point out that since we're using
a child theme we don't need to update the child theme because it's not made by anyone else but ourselves
but the parent theme can be updated and we won't overwrite any of the changes we've made in the child
themed code by updating the parent theme.
So it's a good idea just to click Update now that will leave us on the same screen and when the parent
theme gets updated none of the changes in our child theme get over written great.
I've got a success message read appear at the top you know I could have done that theme update just
by going to the updates screen where I was before and doing it just like we did the plugins down at
the bottom.
Well now I don't have an update Knag right here at the top nor any notifications down on my side menus
under plug ins or under updates here.
And if I go to this Updates page you could see that everything is updated and there now I do want to
go over to my Web site itself make sure I refresh the page make sure there's no problems with my theme
or on my Web site at all.
This looks great just like we had set it up before.
Excellent and I'll go down to the bottom and make sure my customization here in the child theme is still
active and looking good.
That looks great.
Now it's worth noting that you can deactivate a theme if you introduce an update and it does break the
Web site in some way.
You would just go back into your file structure either via FCP or via the Explorer or the finder.
If you're working locally go back into the WP content folder.
Open up themes and identify which theme you just updated that's causing the problem and you can go through
the same technique by just renaming that theme and then it will deactivate itself.
In this lesson you worked on one of your previous WordPress installations either locally or at your
live server and updated plugins and themes.
You also looked at how you would go about deactivating a plug in or theme.
In the case that the update has caused a problem in the next video we'll look at some different options
for managing multiple web sites from one central location.
There are a bunch of different third party services many free with paid upgrades that can make it easier
to manage updates for multiple sites using this process.
You can manage a group of Wordpress sites for yourself or for your clients saving time by accessing
them as a group instead of having to log into each one individually.
See their