I do believe that in the past years the WordPress team have done everything they could to get an amazing piece of software and really mess up some of its former qualities. The new WordPress 3.7 comes with automatic updates, which to me are absolutely USELESS, not to mention they could give me even more headaches.
I’m not the type of a webmaster who doesn’t upgrade the platform. Usually, as soon as I get the yellow bar in wp-admin, notifying me there’s a new version, I’ll start the upgrade. But I do want to know WHEN a new release is coming and also get the chance to backup my files/database if I feel like, see if the upgrade won’t mess with a plugin/theme I created.
99.9% of the times an upgrade is going nicely and it’s done in 3 seconds. I do have custom themes (so am not updating the default one, ‘erasing’ all my customizations) and don’t usually modify the core of the WordPress installation or its plugins. And yet, there are times when something can go wrong and I’d like to have full control over it.
So, if you’re like me and still want to do your own upgrades and not have WordPress do them without your prior consent, fortunately there’s a simple fix:
By using your preferred FTP client, navigate to the ROOT of your WordPress installation. Download wp-config.php
Add this like somewhere in the top:
define( 'AUTOMATIC_UPDATER_DISABLED', true );
Upload the modified file overwriting the old one.
That should do it. You will get notified when a new update is coming and you can then make the upgrade as you did before.
Thanks for the fix. I didn’t like the sound of automatic updates either so glad that you have provided a work around.
Yeah, I hate the idea of having the platform do anything ‘automated’. If it messes up something, I’m the one left with a broken blog 😀
Do you mind me also sharing this on my blog?
Please do, the more people know, the better. From what I see the WP community is not really that thrilled with this new feature anyway 😀
[…] supplied by dojo and I thought I would share the knowledge so go and thank her at her article about disabling automatic updates in 3.7 if you have the […]
FTP … me!!
I hadn’t been aware of this feature — I definitely have to follow your tip, thanks so much! Just hope I can manage with this @#$*!!^ stuff (God, I’m so tired of having to handle so many techie things, eating up time from research and writing, ugh!)
Ok, end of rant. Thanks again! 🙂
Contact me if you want me to handle this for you 🙂
Hi Romona,
I never knew that was possible. Thanks for the code, I will definitely be placing that inside my wp_config file to stop the automatic updates.
I like to do my own updates, I don’t want them to be automatically done for me.
Thanks for sharing and I hope you have a great day.
If you usually have no issues with the updates, you can let it on auto, but it’s always better to have it all under control 🙂
Nice article.
I wonder if there any plugins to do that work. I am not comfortable with editing the PHP files from web hosting account.
Thanks in advance.