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

Three gaps the WordPress maintenance industry still hasn’t solved — from a survey of four major tools

WordPress maintenance automation has a long-running market, especially outside Japan. ManageWP, MainWP, WP Umbrella, InfiniteWP — each has more than a decade of history behind it. While building our comparison pages, we surveyed all four side by side. An interesting pattern emerged: three things none of the four tools offer. Each is a gap the industry has long treated as “not feasible,” and there are structural reasons why. Here’s a look at those three unsolved areas — and why they remain unsolved. Gap 1 — Per-plugin updates with HTTP checks between each one In most maintenance tools, plugin updates run in bulk. After the batch, the tool takes a sitewide …

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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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WordPress Maintenance

When WP-CLI fatals on the plugin you came to rescue

A WordPress plugin update breaks the site. You SSH in to roll back the bad plugin with WP-CLI, and you get this: Fatal error: Uncaught Error: … in /path/to/broken-plugin/main.php:42 The plugin you came to fix has now stopped the tool you came to fix it with. It looks contradictory, but it makes sense once you know how WP-CLI starts up — and there’s a flag pair that gets you out. Why WP-CLI itself crashes When you run a rollback command like wp plugin install <name> –version=X –force, WP-CLI internally boots WordPress before doing anything else. Plugin registration and option loading all happen during WordPress’s startup, so a broken plugin gets …

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WordPress Maintenance

‘Command not found’ — and what’s really blocking WP-CLI

“I downloaded wp-cli.phar, uploaded it to ~/bin/wp, SSH’d in, and ran wp. Got -bash: wp: command not found. The file is right there. Why?” If you’ve set up WP-CLI on a shared host using a browser-based file manager, you may have hit exactly this. The file exists, permissions are 755, size is 6.8 MB (matches the official PHAR). And yet it refuses to run. The “command not found” message can hide an entirely different problem underneath. The file is there, but nothing runs After SSHing in, you can confirm the file exists: $ ls -la ~/bin/wp -rwxr-xr-x 1 c1234567 c1234567 7142777 May 8 10:00 /home/c1234567/bin/wp $ wp –info -bash: wp: …

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WordPress Maintenance

Why WP-CLI Won’t Start on Some Shared Hosts — A Field Investigation Across Four Architectures

If you build any kind of WordPress maintenance automation, sooner or later you hit a wall the official WP-CLI install instructions don’t warn you about. The setup is supposed to be simple — drop one file onto the server and make it usable as a command — yet on shared hosting it fails in a different way on every host. This article summarizes what we learned by running a read-only SSH-based diagnostic across four shared hosts — ConoHa WING, Xserver, Sakura Internet, and Heteml — to find out what really separates “WP-CLI runs” from “WP-CLI fails to start.” The “one-liner install” assumption breaks early The official WP-CLI install snippet looks …

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WordPress Maintenance

Improving WordPress Maintenance Quality with SSH + WP-CLI — A Framework for Safer Updates

WordPress maintenance usually means updating the core, plugins, and themes. In most agencies, this is done by logging into the admin dashboard, clicking the “Update” button on each plugin, checking the front page, and moving on to the next site. This works fine for a handful of sites. But once you manage more than a few, the limitations become hard to ignore: The dashboard only offers “Update all” or “Tick each one” — no real middle ground When something breaks after an update, isolating the cause is messy Backups, visual checks, and rollback are all manual steps The quality of maintenance varies by who is on the keyboard, and at …

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