WordPress Maintenance

Renaming a site without losing its data — separating display name from a stable identifier

A client asks you to rename a site from acme-staging to the production name acme. The moment you rename it in the app, the DB backups, screenshots, and thumbnails you had been collecting all appear to disappear. The files are still on disk, but the new directory is empty. The data hasn’t carried over as “the same site.” It’s a trap you can fall into on day one, and we did — with our original design. Here’s how we redesigned things so renames don’t orphan data. Why the data appears to disappear — the site name was the key The original design of WP Maintenance Manager decided file locations based …

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WordPress Maintenance

Beyond ‘Update All’ — selecting plugins across sites while keeping every safety mechanism on

“A vulnerability in Elementor was just disclosed. Several of the sites I maintain run Elementor. I need to update only Elementor across those sites today.“ If you maintain WordPress sites for multiple clients, this scenario happens several times a month. Core updates and other plugin updates can wait for the regular maintenance run, but a specific plugin needs to land urgently. The trouble is that mainstream maintenance tools don’t really offer a UI for “a targeted update across multiple sites, with safety mechanisms intact.” Here’s how that design problem can be solved. The limits of an industry-standard “Update All” Most WordPress maintenance tools have an “Update All” button on each …

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WordPress Maintenance

Pinpoint rollback — building per-plugin revert with WP-CLI

You batch-update 20 plugins, and one breaks the site. Most WordPress maintenance tools play it safe and roll back all 20 updates (variations on “Safe Updates” or “Atomic Updates”). It’s a reasonable default. But running in production, you start running into cases where you want only the broken one reverted, and the other 19 to keep their updates. Here’s how that design is built on top of WP-CLI. The command that makes it possible — wp plugin install –version=X –force WP-CLI has a powerful command for “install a plugin at a specific version, overwriting whatever’s currently there”: wp plugin install <plugin-slug> –version=1.2.3 –force –skip-plugins –skip-themes What each flag does: –version=1.2.3 …

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WordPress Maintenance

After a core rollback, halt the rest — a safety design we arrived at the hard way

In WordPress maintenance automation, you inevitably run into points where you have to decide: keep going, or stop right here? One that took us a long time to get right was this: when a WordPress core update goes wrong and gets rolled back, should the remaining plugin updates continue, or stop? We eventually switched to the “stop” design, but we started with “keep going” — and several traps surfaced only after running it in production. Here’s how the redesign happened. Three cases to separate The outcome of a core update, viewed through a rollback lens, falls into three patterns: Case 1: Core rollback succeeded, site recovered — the site is …

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