From development point of view the most practical way to detect and locate changes is version control – comparing against SVN/Git checkout of core or use such checkout directly. However there are also plugins around that verify files against set of hashes. I think Sucuri Security recently got such feature. The practical limitation of them … Read more
If my guess is right that you think you add your site URL inside the plugin’s head and it will magically update everyones plugin, then I have to tell you that wont work. You have choices: Either you host your plugin on wordpress.org and updates work pretty much without you doing anything then pushing your … Read more
Make a copy of the site in localhost, this will be better approch. To upgrade site see Upgarding WordPress – Extended Instructions
In my readings (and as mentioned in OP comments) the best practice seemed to be focusing on the /wp-content/ folder, or specific custom contents therein. Syncing all the core files and third party plugins just causes headaches and unnecessary version monitoring. I had troubles with this myself, but it’s best to remove the mentality that … Read more
As long as everything was made according to WP best practices all your manually installed versions will update the same as the ones installed from wordpress.org. The updater looks at many things to identify your plugin. However, the most important is the plugin URI (you can change the directory of many plugins and they will … Read more
There’s a page here about Configuring Automatic Background Updates. It says specifically not to put the filters in wp-config.php, so you should definitely move those to functions.php; they were probably not registered if added in wp-config.php so that explains why you didn’t get plugin or theme updates, but core updates should have worked. Only constants … Read more
You could create a cronjob that runs on 1am every 24 hours. With WP CLI this would be something like: wp core update && wp plugin update –all && wp theme update So you just create a .sh script, put the above in it, and run the script with a cronjob.
Are you able to update standard WP repo plugins? I am using that library and it seems to work well. What’s the exact error that WordPress gives on the admin screen when it tries to run the update? I would take a look at permissions first. What are the permissions on the old plugin directory? … Read more
sample code that you can addopt and chage… to check is plugin installed. // addition check on init hook. add_action(‘admin_init’, ‘wpse_73859_init’); function wpse_73859_init(){ // if – we in wp-admin // if – we class of polylang not found // and if we can manage_options (there a lot of different // capabilities you can use install_plugins … Read more
WP checks for updates by sending data about all plugins and themes to the repository. To prevent false update messages for your own code you need to selectively scrub it out of those requests. The example for theme by Mark Jaquith: function cws_hidden_theme_12345( $r, $url ) { if ( 0 !== strpos( $url, ‘http://api.wordpress.org/themes/update-check’ ) … Read more