Many of us seldom visit the admin dashboard in WordPress, even if we do we may not really pay attention to the updates available to the plugins we use, one of our twitter followers for @weblogtooltips Avaz tweeted this.
Taking cue from that I quickly wrote a plugin that will do what Avaz suggested, it will send out updates via email to administrators whenever there are new plugin updates available to install.
You can setup the updates to go out daily, weekly or monthly and also choose to receive intimations for deactivated plugins.
The plugin requires you to setup the options before it actually works, you will see a message in the admin header to setup the option if you haven’t done that at-least once.
For for information and downloading visit the Plugin Updates Email Notifier homepage.
We keep a hawk eye on our twitter account, so don’t forget to send us your tips, questions and more to @weblogtooltips on twitter.
How do you not visit the admin dashboard? everytime you log in , it takes you there, you need to go to it to write a post/page, just scroll down to see the red circle with white number.
Actually, I maintain a lot of WordPress powered websites and plenty of them use WordPress as a CMS. Thus, many of them don’t accept comments and site editors write through custom writing panels. I keep the WordPress and plugin updates and other technical stuff. Now I hope you understand how this plugin will help me 🙂
Tried installing it and I get the following error. I am using WP 2.8.
The plugin does not have a valid header.
Alex
Do you have access to your site’s cpanel? I tried uploading three plugins from my computer today using WP’s plugin upload and all three gave me the same error. But when I uploaded and unzipped them via my cpanel they all worked fine.
If you don’t have the few minutes of time to visit your admin dashboard every day and use the plugin auto-update option, is it really that important tat you’re running the very latest version of all of your plugins?
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great concept for a plugin, I’m just not sure if Avaz really needs it.
Seems like a decent plugin to notify you of updates, but I seem to agree with Miroslav about logging in. If you are not logging in that much, then what are you really doing on your site? Maybe you have scheduled posts, but what happens to comments made?
It must be tested because seems a pretty cool plugin. Good work Keith.
Thank you for this useful plugin.
Keep up the good job!
>>If you are not logging in that much, then what are you really doing on your site? Maybe you have scheduled posts, but what happens to comments made?
If you write and edit your posts and pages offline with a tool like Windows Live Writer, as I do, then you don’t need to visit your blog’s admin at all and so you won’t see any admin pages unless you specifically log in to your blog.
You can moderate comments remotely by clicking on an appropriate link in the email notification you get or by going directly to the comment moderation section in your blog: no need to go to the dashboard first.
I tend to log in once a week or so specifically to see what’s new, eg, plugins. So the idea of being emailed when there are new ones is quite appealing (although I’d rather get alerts via RSS).
Still, wherever you log in, dashboard or any other part of your blog, you’ll see that highlighted number of plugin updates in the left-hand column, if there are any, and if you’re running WP 2.7 or later.
The same with more functions:
http://www.svenkubiak.de/mail-on-update
WordPress plugins ? A real fascinating world where you find three times the same thing…
@Li-An Thanks for that, I searched for something similar and did not find it that is the reason I wrote this plugin.
I am a staunch believer in not duplicating anyone else’s work, if I would have known about this I would have given Avaz this link earlier.
Oh no, I did not mean you copied the plugin :-)! It’s only funny to see how good ideas may be repeated. It’s not a problem there are some plugins doing the same task because they may be not supported any more and to find a replacement solution is always nice.
Even better: Instead of having me manually click “automatically upgrade plugin” on each and every plugin, have the WordPress Cron do that automatically. Perhaps with the possibility to deselect certain plugins if you don’t want the new versions of it.
No need to visit dashboard, and no need to fill up your email inbox. Voila!
🙂
That would be great!
Now, only if someone could write a comment subscription plugin which would tweet notifications about replies to comments. If there is such a plugin, can anybody direct me to it?
I’ve installed this plugin right after the announcement over here but still haven’t got any notification about plugin updates :/
what could be the problem?
It works only two times by day like WP installation does with the plugin updates.