Built-in upgrade

Has anyone thought about a built-in upgrade capability? WordPress can update itself, the plug-in can as well. This would be an extremely helpful feature.

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Hi @Dickinson, I’m not part of the Omeka team, so I can’t say what – if anything – they have planned regarding built-in upgrading, but I’ve found it beneficial to just use Installatron via CPanel to manage my Omeka installations. The update schedule lags a bit but it’s much less tedious than manually updating Omeka and you can set it to run core updates automatically or with a few clicks. I’ve also used custom bash scripts, particularly for updating plugins and themes. I don’t know what is involved in adding built-in updgrades, but I agree that it would be nice to have.

We don’t use a hosting service that has cpanel here. The idea of manual updating Omeka makes me cringe.

Having the software be able to update itself from the interface means having it have permission to edit its own files. Having, for example, Wordpress sites have this kind of permission as a matter of course is convenient for upgrades, but is also part of what makes it more vulnerable to some types of attack. My judgment is that it’s not worth the tradeoff.

Updating themes and plugins is almost the same process as installing them: just delete the current copy of the theme or plugin folder and drop in the new one. Updating the core means just carrying over the db.ini and config.ini files, and files/, plugins/ and themes/ folders from the old to the new. I don’t tend to see this process as terribly onerous but obviously opinions on that may vary.

@Dickinson, if you’re interested in creating a bash script for running updates, you could review this one (curatescape_utility.sh), which uses git to (somewhat inefficiently) update plugins and themes (not core). It could probably use some love but I haven’t gotten around to it just yet, despite the fact that I use it regularly for about 40 Omeka installations. Be sure to review the README file since this does something rather specific that probably isn’t exactly what you need. But it may still be useful as an example.

I see manual updating as a security risk vs what you stated about WordPress. Updated software is usually better than something that never is updated.

Unfortunately I do not have that level of expertise.

Maybe limiting the autoupdating function to themes and plugins could be a safer choice?..

A plugin could do it, I suppose, but then would not be able to autoupdate itself, so a core function could work better.

This feature will be integrated in next version of module EasyAdmin. It’s not complex to integrate because it already manages installation, but many checks should be added for security on each file and because in some cases, in particular for themes, the end users modify files or config instead of in main local config.

In fact my answer was for Omeka S, so ignore it.

not sure why, but im under classic forums and im using Omeka S, so your response was what I was wondering about. any word on updates?

I’ll move your post to the S section.

Thank you so much! Sorry for my error.