[wp-hackers] Plugin Authors: Major Plugin Upgrade Question

[Vasyl Martyniuk]

Hi Scott,
   You can check WordPress Plugin Kickstarter (
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-plugin-kickstarter/). It has
an idea how to handle plugin upgrade process.
    Create a simple plugin with Kickstarter and check main file.

  Regards,
  Vasyl

On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 12:47 PM, Scott Kingsley Clark <scott at skcdev.com>wrote:

> I've got a pretty beefy question for plugin authors. I'm getting ready
> to release a major new version of one of my plugins, but really don't
> know how to handle the upgrade as I've never attempted anything of
> this scale for any of my plugins in the past.
>
> There's a lot of DB changes, a big codebase change (refactor), etc..
>
> Do I submit a new plugin to WP.org, update my old plugin readme.txt to
> tell users to check out the new version, that way they can install/
> activate and run the upgrade script that is required? (has to be run
> by hand, as the upgrade could potentially fail if just run
> automatically for really really large sites using this plugin (server
> config issues like timeouts etc)
>
> Or how should I handle the upgrade? Do I try to figure out some
> complex workaround to keep sites functional up until the upgrade
> script is run (once they've upgraded to the new major version)?
>
> Also -- if I do the plugin release in-place (like a normal plugin
> update would be), how do I communicate to users that an upgrade script
> needs to be run, to backup their DBs before upgrading in WP itself
> (the plugin updater), etc..? How do I handle this for future 2.x
> releases, for users who didn't have time to update to 2.0? Do I keep
> that text in the upgrade notices forever?
>
> Any tips are appreciated, I want to be sure I'm thinking about all my
> options and so far it seems like I must be overlooking something.
> Users are #1 here, so I don't want to do anything that would disrupt
> their site.
>
>
> -Scott
>
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-- 
*Vasyl Martyniuk*