Wrights HQ
A blog by Ian Wright - Front-end web developer
on WordPress
With the release of WordPress 3.7 comes some fancy core updates, mainly focusing on security & stability.
What a lot of the WordPress community are excited about is the addition of automatic updates. For many this is a great feature where they know their websites are always going to be running the most secure version & hopefully stop any attempts at hacks, but I believe the automatic updates also introduces problems.
For me, I like to test each plugin thoroughly to make sure it’s compatible with my version of core, with automatic updates I would no longer be able to do this & have to rely on the maintainers to keep everything up-to-date, to me, this is too risky.
Building web applications on a daily basis I use GIT, this allows me to keep track of code, roll back to previous versions, have backups & check the differences between versions of code; having automatic updates enabled will cause conflicts when deploying.
Please note: WordPress have added a feature into the automatic updater to look for a variety of version control files e.g. .git, .svn & if it finds these files the updater is automatically cancelled.
To disable updates manually all you need to do is add the following line to your wp-config.php file.
# Disables all core updates:
define('WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', false);
For more information you can read the fantastic article by Andrew Nacin over at wordpress.org.