Looking at the upcoming release of Wordpress 5.5.
Release Candidate 2 is in the wild, and they are still looking at an August 11th release.
I’m just curious if other Domains administrators have been looking at the new features and if that will change any guidance they give for new signups or settings in Installatron. The defining feature of Wordpress 5.5 is going to be that themes and plugins can automatically update themselves, much like how Wordpress can automatically update itself for security releases.
I’m wondering if these latest changes to Wordpress have changed the advise we give to students and new site owners with Wordpress between choosing the installatron updater, automatically updating, or logging in and periodically updating.
In my instance we have been pretty aggressive with forcing upgrades… We have been turning off old versions of PHP, etc.
How heavy of a hand do other admins do to try to encourage being on the latest version? Will that change as new updating routines appear in Wordpress?
Just a nice coda on this… I use the post SMTP plugin on several of my websites so that my emails don’t come from wordpress@site.url but come from an email address that someone actually checks.
Latest update to that plugin bricked my website, and I had to disable it from cpanel in order to bring my site back up. So I continue to be suspicious of automatic updates, especially ones that don’t backup the site before they start!
The auto-update in 5.5 for themes and plugins gives me mild heartburn. I try to encourage folks here, as a matter of regular practice, to enable day/week/month backup rotation on their Wordpress sites, though not everyone does this.
Over the last week, several folks here have had trouble with FeedWordPress plugin (which we use a lot). It’s broken sites, requiring a manual disabling of the plugin via File Manager. Here is the note from Wordpress support site: WordPress 5.5 will require plugin modification | WordPress.org . No sense of when this might get fixed.
I don’t imagine we have anyone running Post SMTP Mailer, but I will now check. Also, it looks like its developer is working on fixes: WP 5.5 class-phpmailer.php Deprecated! | WordPress.org
Any other plugin fallout from the Wordpress 5.5 release folks should know about?
Hi Tim,
Post SMTP Mailer has already released a patch that works. It’s just my website updated the minute there was a new version, and that version completely broke the website, including not allowing to update to the next version that is no longer broken.
So quick uninstall, reinstall from the file manager, we’re back in business.
One thing I wanted to add here, Installatron disables the native WordPress updates via a wp-config.php flag
/**
* Turn off automatic updates since these are managed externally by Installatron.
* If you remove this define() to re-enable WordPress's automatic background updating
* then it's advised to disable auto-updating in Installatron.
*/
define('AUTOMATIC_UPDATER_DISABLED', true);
So if an install was done with Installatron then updates to plugins and themes as well as core WP will still be handled by Installatron where a backup is taken prior to any update being done.
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