WP Easy Updates
We are happy to introduce WP Easy Updates! WPEU is our new update plugin, we will be using it to provide licencing and updates to all our GeoDirectory addons as well as all our future non GD products, in fact anyone who sells WP Plugins (and soon to be themes) through Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) or even provides a free plugin on github can use WPEU to licence and update their plugins easily!
How to use
With the last round of GD updates you will notice a notification informing you WPEU is now required.
After installing the plugin it should automatically copy over your already installed licence keys to the new locations. For plugins that require a licence you will see a notification and a place to enter the licence under the plugins page.
Clicking the “Licence Key” will reveal a place to enter and activate/deactivate a licence key for the product, once the licence key is activated the “Licence Key” text will turn green and the notification message will disappear on the next page refresh.
Why WP Easy Updates?
There are many reasons we have switched to a standalone update plugin:
- The standard EDD update script will try to ping for each plugin update, though we had already modified our own update script to send only one update array check, WPEU will make this easier to maintain.
- WPEU will be able to check for an update for non-active plugins, this is great for users and also for security.
- Much better WP Multisite support, before our update script required the addons to be active and licensed on the main site to work, with WPEU it can be active on any network site.
- Maintenance, before WPEU if we had to make a change to our update script we had to make a change in all addons and then update all addons, this way we only have to update WPEU (which updates itself from github)
- Space, WPEU allows us to remove our old update script from all our addons and saves over 1000 lines of code per addon.
- Pre-release updates, with WPEU we can release any free plugin and update it just from github, in fact WPEU will update itself from github.
- WPEU requires just two lines of code to enable updates to any plugin, this will make it easy to use for us and any 3rd part developers to implement updates in their plugin.
- There is no need for a separate licencing page as licences are entered direct on the plugins page.
For Developers
It is easy for developers to enable updates for their EDD or github plugin by adding only 1-2 lines to their main plugin file DocBlock, for EDD just enter your EDD sales site as the “Update URL” and the post id of the product as the “Update ID” as below:
For a github update you just need to enter the “Update URL” as the github URL, it will check against the github releases for updates so you can update your github repo as normal and it will only check against release version numbers.
If you want to add a notification WPEU is required you can use the code snippet here:
https://gist.github.com/Stiofan/d8f5b5aa3922cfb46928966e75424c11
WP Easy Updates is hosted on github here: https://github.com/AyeCode/wp-easy-updates
Find out more about automatic updates for GeoDirectory here” with a link to https://wpgeodirectory.com/docs/installing-addons/#updates
If you have any questions just ask in the comments section.