WordPress Maintenance

When WP admin shows a plugin update but WP-CLI doesn’t — making automation see proprietary updaters

You open the “Updates” page in WordPress admin and see that Elementor Pro / ACF Pro / vk-blocks-pro have updates available. Then you run wp plugin update –all from your automation, and those exact plugins don’t update. The asymmetry — “the admin sees it; WP-CLI doesn’t” — traces back to how WordPress detects updates and how premium plugins layer proprietary update mechanisms on top of that. Here’s the mechanism and how an automation tool can adapt. WordPress update detection is held by a transient cache WordPress doesn’t decide “is there an update?” on every request. It caches the answer in the wp_options table as a transient, valid for up to …

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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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