Newspaper 6 Automated Updates

Hello,

We are fairly new to the Newspaper 6 theme. We were just notified from Themeforest.net the theme needs to be downloaded and updated.

That process seems a bit out dated considering so many themes and plugins allow for an automated update from within WP Admin. Those requiring licenses do so by having the license entered into the theme in WP Admin to allow for this to happen.

I could not find anything for WP Admin updates in the support forum. Does Newspaper 6 have a WP Admin update option?

Most themes which auto update in WP use either a theme foundry plugin; or can be updated due to being in the WordPress theme repository (e.g., free themes).

Most commercial themes on ThemeForest and commercial plugins don’t have an “auto update” feature, and generally this is a BAD idea — for example, if people had done auto update from NP4 to NP6, and woken up to find their site broken, that would not have been good.

Similarly some plugins may change settings and require workarounds and/or a perfect example is Yoast who “updated” their old wp meta plugin, by disabling it without telling people it would disable it, even though it still worked. Then printed message on screen – “we’ve discontinued this plugin, please upgrade to Yoast SEO” — well, on one site we didn’t want to do that and had to revert to the original meta plugin. Ouch!

Envato tried to build a theme updater for their themes and you can certainly try that. But often it’s best to review the changelog and see what changed so that you don’t wipe your child theme changes if there is major child theme update, or reset your home page if VC changes, etc.

For example an auto updater today might update the entire theme by deleting old folder and any customizations, and upload new one; when only thing changed was Visual Composer update for security issue. So, today only update it the VC plugin which can be done manually via FTP.

So, while it sounds like a good idea — in practice, it’s really not that advisable.

Hope that made sense — not trying to be contrary, just some feedback from using WP for 10 years and having a lot of cock ups from “auto updates” — we turn them ALL off for our sites due to too many site crashes in middle of the night without warning, or CPU spikes crashing entire box due to a bad plugin (e.g., YOAST, often has major bugs every damn dot upgrade then rushes out 3 rounds of “oops” fixes…. seriously… never install that on “new dot upgrade” — it’s a bad bad idea!). 🙂