Safe Updates

Make sure your theme and plugins are tested before updating WordPress.

Backstory

Recently, WordPress 5.3 came out which included quite a good number of outstanding improvements. I was excited and updated few of my installations only to find out that some of them ran into fatal errors. Upon investigation, I discovered some plugins which were conflicting simply because they were not tested and incompatible with the update. I wondered, only if there was a plugin which could warn me about plugins or themes that might have not been tested, just before I tried to run updates.

Thus, I decided to build Safe Updates, a small nifty WordPress plugin which lets you know if there are any plugin or theme on your installation that might have not been tested with the target WordPress version before you try to update.

Use Cases

The use case of this plugin is very straight-forward. It just gives you an idea about untested plugins or themes that may be untested with the updated WordPress versions and helps you be cautious for conflicts and errors.

Core Features

The core features of this plugin include:

1. Display active plugin(s) that might have not been tested with the target WordPress version.
2. Show if the current theme has not been tested with the target WordPress version.

Notes

Some notes to consider while using this plugin:

1. The interface only shows up when a core update is available.
2. A plugin/theme author might choose not to disclose the WordPress version up to which it might have been tested up to. In such a case, a plugin/theme might still be incompatible with the targetted update, but Safe Updates might not show it if its author didn’t disclose its tested up to version.

Installation

Installation of the Safe Updates plugin is very simple. Follow along with the installation procedure in the dedicated Installation tab.

Usage

1. Install and activate the plugin
2. Go to WP Admin → Dashboard → Updates.
3. If a WordPress update is available, this plugin will add an interface above the “Update” button which shows if any of your theme or plugins have not been tested with the target WordPress version.

Support

If the above usage steps don’t answer your question(s), if you want to report an issue or if something is not working as expected, please create a topic in the Support Forum or create an issue on GitHub.

Contribute

If you want to contribute to the plugin by reporting issues, implementing new features and so on, here’s its development repository on Github.

Credits

The interface design of this plugin is heavily inspired by the Shared UI from WPMU DEV (Yes, you got that right! I currently work there, we’re a wonderful company and we’re hiring!)

Sponsor

You can sponsor this project and support my open-source development by becoming a Patron!