Plugins hosted on the WordPress repository enjoy a very neat and integrated update procedure whereby as soon as you upload a new version of the plugin, the users will get a notification in their dashboard saying that there is a new version available.

However if on the other hand your plugin is not hosted on the repository, you might be wondering if you can achieve the same thing. As you might have guessed, the answer is yes!

A Github-hosted project by Jeremy Clark provides all the code you need:

https://github.com/jeremyclark13/automatic-theme-plugin-update

Here’s another free solution by W-Shadow:

http://w-shadow.com/blog/2010/09/02/automatic-updates-for-any-plugin/

And yet another one by Jason Gill:

http://www.gilluminate.com/2011/12/23/host-your-own-custom-wordpress-plugin-updater/

If you’d like to build it yourself, there is an excellent tutorial on WP.Tutsplus.com:

http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/plugins/a-guide-to-the-wordpress-http-api-automatic-plugin-updates/

There is also a Codecanyon item named WordPress Plugin Update which does a similar job and might be worth checking out too.

Preventing Updates

Many developers also develop plugins for particular clients. In this case, they might want to prevent WordPress from sending out any data to WordPress.org when doing update checks. The code below, provided by Mark Jaquith, will do the trick:

[php]
function cws_hidden_plugin_12345( $r, $url ) {
if ( 0 !== strpos( $url, ‘http://api.wordpress.org/plugins/update-check’ ) )
return $r; // Not a plugin update request. Bail immediately.
$plugins = unserialize( $r[‘body’][‘plugins’] );
unset( $plugins->plugins[ plugin_basename( __FILE__ ) ] );
unset( $plugins->active[ array_search( plugin_basename( __FILE__ ), $plugins->active ) ] );
$r[‘body’][‘plugins’] = serialize( $plugins );
return $r;
}

add_filter( ‘http_request_args’, ‘cws_hidden_plugin_12345’, 5, 2 );
[/php]

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