Plugin Updates

Hi all,

we’ve been asked recently by several people why is it that our WordPress plugins do not appear in the updates. We told them that it is because they are not distributed through the WP plugin directory which handles this automatically. I would like to solve this problem though.

Problem: How to enable autoupdate for your WP plugin or theme in a way that would be both easy to use for the customer and yet would prevent unauthorized copying.

I know there are brilliant minds in this community, that could help out.

My idea is that we could create either a separate WP plugin that would take care of every item installed from the marketplaces with a simple hook or interface that would enable plugin and theme authors to join, or a framework that people could embed into their themes or plugins.

I would like to this to be open source, so we could all benefit, something like OptionTree, so I’m thinking a repo on GitHub? I’m also willing to invest my own time and energy into this for the community.

The only thing that seems to be problematic so far is the mechanism for authentification, I think we might need some help with that from Envato. Some of this can be achieved via the API right now, but I don’t think that would be the ultimate solution. Until we get proper support from Envato we can develop an earlier version of this, that would only notify the user that the update is available.

Please let me know what do you think, or if you are interested in helping me out. I would also like to hear from Envato staff if this is something that they would be willing/able to help us with.

UDS

That sounds really good. It would be nice with an official initiative.

Several authors including our self have made systems that notifies the user about updates, but it would be nice to also be able to offer the automatic update inside wp-admin!

Great to hear that Jeffrey!

Looking forward to seeing that in action. If there’s need for beta-testers or even developers, feel free to contact us, we’ll be more than glad to help.

UDS

In the process of adding an update system to my plugins, but I cannot wait for an official method.

Hey guys, since we have no idea of when the official option for this is going to be available, I’ve gone ahead and finished the one I was working on. It’s actually a fork of the theme update notifier script written by Unisphere, but adapted to work with plugins. I’ve created a forum topic for it here: http://codecanyon.net/forums/thread/a-wordpress-plugin-update-notifier-script/50850

mordauk said
Hey guys, since we have no idea of when the official option for this is going to be available, I’ve gone ahead and finished the one I was working on. It’s actually a fork of the theme update notifier script written by Unisphere, but adapted to work with plugins. I’ve created a forum topic for it here: http://codecanyon.net/forums/thread/a-wordpress-plugin-update-notifier-script/50850

Good Idea Mordauk!

I elaborated on it a bit and here’s my updated version: https://github.com/meosoft/WordPress-Plugin-Update-Notifier-for-Code-Canyon

It has support for multiple plugins, so if, say, two of my plugins and one your plugin use the same basic script it should not produce errors. I also updated some other small things like, for example I changed the cache to use WP’s Transient APIs.. I can send you pull request if you want .

Anyway hope you’ll like it

Excellent! I’ll it out.