Managing your WordPress Plugins on Pressable

Overview

The Plugin Management feature allows you to manage your site’s plugins directly from My Pressable Control Panel (MPCP) without having to access the WordPress Admin backend. With this feature, you can perform the following actions:

• View a list of active WordPress plugins installed on your site.
• Check the version number of the plugin and also the status (active, drop-in)
• View if a plugin has an update available
• Schedule plugin update availability checks
• Execute the updates after performing safety checks

Please note that this feature is available to both site owners and collaborators. This is a paid feature that can be purchased on a per-site basis. You will have access to a 30-day trial for each site before getting charged for this.

This feature can be accessed from the My Pressable Control Panel, on the navigation bar to the left, with a link called “Plugin Management”.

How to Purchase

To purchase the Plugin Management feature for your site/s, navigate to the Plugin Management page in your my.pressable.com Dashboard. You will see a list of sites for which you can add the Plugin Management feature, the list also shows which sites have a trial available and which do not.

Check the boxes next to the sites you wish to add and then click on the Continue to Purchase button at the bottom of the page.

You will be presented with a monthly or yearly purchase option, depending on your account payment plan:

If you are on a monthly Pressable plan, you’ll get a monthly Plugin Management purchase option. If you are on a yearly Pressable plan, you will get a yearly purchase option.

Once you complete the purchase, you will be required to accept the Terms of Service. These terms must be accepted once per site / per user.

After accepting the TOS, you will be taken to the Manage Plugins page where you can add automated schedules for your plugins so they update when you want them to without breaking your site.

The schedule will:

• Check your site for plugin updates
• Clone a copy of your site
• Update the plugins you’ve designated in your schedule
• Perform a URL health check on the paths you selected
• Update plugins on the original site
• Restore the previous version if the URL health check fails

Create Automated Plugin Update Schedules

You can start creating an automated schedule by clicking the creating one link under the Active Schedules section.

Within Step 1, the schedule name and the desired recurrence need to be entered. You can also select your local Timezone to make things easier to manage and keep track of. Currently, you can create up to two Plugin Schedules per Site. Each schedule will run as close to the time you choose as possible.

In Step 2, you can choose which plugins will be checked for updates when the schedule is run. There is no limit to the number of plugins that can be selected for a schedule. You can also toggle a switch to include all current active plugins.

When a Schedule is run, the front page is tested to make sure there are no errors after the updates. In Step 3, you can choose up to 10 additional web pages that will be tested to make sure your site is still healthy after the update is executed.

Click on the “Create Schedule” button to finish the process.

Once a Plugin Schedule has been created, there are four Plugin Schedule Options:

1. Run Now – allows you to run the Plugin Schedule immediately on demand, without waiting for its Daily/Weekly run.
2. Dry Run Now – allows you to execute a dry run of the Plugin Schedule immediately on demand, without waiting for its Daily/Weekly run. Additional details on this are added in the Dry Run Executions section of this document.
3. Disable Schedule – allows you to pause the Plugin Schedule (daily/weekly) from being run automatically. However, you will still be able to run it on demand.
4. Delete Schedule – allows you to delete the Plugin Schedule, this will also delete the execution history associated with the schedule.

Please note that all these options are disabled when a Plugin Schedule is running until the execution is finished. Running Schedules are identified with a temporary notice static Schedule currently running....

Plugin Schedule Execution Workflow

When a Plugin Schedule is run, the execution is broken down into 13 stages. Here’s a quick description of what happens in each one of those steps along with the flowchart outlining the process:

Plugin Management Action History

When execution is finished, these steps are shown in the History as follows:

Most of the steps will have a set of associated results, which can be seen by clicking on the View Results link below. For example, the Verify Updatable Plugins steps results may look like the following:

Dry Run Executions

The Dry Run Now option allows you to execute a dry run of the Plugin Schedule immediately on demand, without waiting for its Daily/Weekly run. These runs have 2 main purposes:

• To run the execution without making changes to the original site
• To leave the cloned Internal Site enabled and available instead of deleting it immediately

This allows you to manually verify the results of the update on the cloned site, especially in case you are working on plugin updates that could potentially break your site.

Dry run executions perform the exact same steps as full executions but they stop at Post-update URL Health Check – Clone Site (Step 10).

Internal Sites

As mentioned in the previous sections, Plugin Management introduces a new kind of Site called Internal Sites. Internal Sites are not considered for billing calculations (disk usage, visits) and are expected to be invisible from the site list on your My Pressable Control Panel. These are only referenced under the View Site link within the Clone Site (Step 4) –

It is also important to note that this site will be automatically removed from our system 7 days after being created when a Dry Run is executed or when a full execution fails. Please note that Internal Sites created as part of an execution workflow are deleted immediately for full executions that finish successfully.

The Internal Site’s details/settings page can be accessed by clicking on the “View Site” link shown in the image above. These sites will have limited functionality compared to a regular site on Pressable:

If the Plugin Schedule execution reports any errors, this site can be used for debugging purposes.

Cancel Plugin Management

From the Manage Plugins page, you can click on the Manage Paid Licence link on the far right to cancel their Plugin Management license for a site.

Collaborator Access

Plugin Management is available to Collaborator users, as long as they have been granted the Plugin Management Access permission:

Plugin Management Site List

You can view a list of sites using the Plugin Management feature by opening your My.Pressable.com Dashboard and navigating to Plugin Management (my.pressable.com/manage_plugins):

Additional Notes

• Premium plugins (ones that require licenses for updates) may have issues with plugin management due to the way they get updated. You will want to test which premium plugins work with our plugin management.
• The number of Plugin Schedules per Site is currently limited to two.
• Plugin Schedules scheduled for the same time will run sequentially.
• There is no limit to the number of plugins that can be tracked by a given Plugin Schedule.
• For this feature to work as expected, the site’s disk space usage must be less than 99GB.
• Once a Plugin Schedule is running, it cannot be stopped, deleted, or disabled until it finishes.
• This feature uses SSH and WP-CLI to perform plugin updates, any limits shown by WP-CLI during these actions are also a limit to our feature. This is important to consider especially when dealing with licensed plugins.
• Internal Sites created as part of an execution workflow are deleted immediately for full executions that finish successfully; Internal Sites are retained for 7 days when created due to a Dry Run or when a full execution fails.
• We use a maximum of 6 On-Demand backups per site (3 FS / 3 DB). When this limit is reached, future schedules will delete old backups in favor of the new ones.
• Plugin Schedules take around 20 minutes on average to fully execute for small sites, this number can grow to several hours depending on how long it takes to create the Filesystem and Database on-demand backups, and the Performance Reports.
• Plugin Schedules have a maximum execution time of 8 hours, if for some reason the execution takes longer, it will be expired and show as a failure.

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If you are having an issue with plugin management functionality not working as expected please contact our support team, we’re always happy to help!