All in One SEO Plugin Turns on Automatic Updates without Notifying Users, Removes Functionality in Latest Release

Buried in the changelog of a series of minor releases that dropped before the Christmas holiday, All in One SEO plugin users were given the surprise gift of automatic updates. After a seemingly endless run of releases (12 updates during a span of six weeks at the end of 2020), the plugin’s developers decided to change its auto update policy …

WordPress Auto-Update System Misfires, Updating Live Sites to an Alpha Release

WordPress’ Core systems team had an eventful Friday when an error in the auto-update system caused sites to update to WordPress 5.5.3-alpha-49449, including live production sites with no auto-update constants defined. I just had a random production site auto-update itself to #WordPress 5.5.3-alpha 😨 Anyone else seeing this? — Mark Root-Wiley (@MRWweb) October 30, 2020 https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js Those who received an …

Core Team Explores Idea to Automatically Upgrade Sites Running WordPress 3.7 to 3.8

WordPress 3.7 ‘Basie’ was released on October 24, 2013 and introduced automatic updates for minor releases to the masses. Although it’s not labeled as such, WordPress 3.7 has effectively acted as a LTS version or Long-term support. Security updates and crucial bug fixes have been ported back to previous branches up to 3.7. In this week’s WordPress developer chat, Aaron …