Multiple WordPress Management Features: Bulk Plugin and Theme Updates

Managing WordPress plugins for 1 site can be a chore in itself.

One website is fine, but when you start scaling up to 10s or even 100s of sites, you’re in for some heavy lifting to keep on top of them all.

And this is only plugins… managing your themes is whole other set of chores.

How does iControlWP help you better manage WordPress plugins and themes?

Since updating WordPress plugins is by far and away the most common WordPress management task, we’ve offered several different avenues to break down plugin management in WordPress.

There are 3 main approaches:

• You can update plugins in bulk based on the plugin name
• You can update plugins in bulk based on the particular site you want to manage
• Or you can update individual plugins.

There are a couple of ways to perform updates for each of these approaches and I’ll address them in turn.

Bulk Update Plugins Based On Plugin Name

So a particular plugin that you use on many of your sites has just been released, how do you handle this with iControlWP?

You have 2 main options:

Bulk Update Plugins Based On WordPress Site

Just like updating plugins based on the plugin name, you can do the same based on the site in particular you want to manage.

Since iControlWP also lets you see details of your sites, there is a further option when you’re managing with the per-site approach:

Bulk Update Options Across All Sites

We have provided a Bulk Actions section which performs large-scale indiscriminate updates. That is to say, you can simply update all plugins across all sites in 1 go.

See the image below:

Many Update Options Available

All the options outlined above apply in the exactly the same way for WordPress Themes. All the same options exists and the paths for achieving the same thing work for themes as well as plugins.

With iControlWP we have tried to provide different ways to do the same things. Since we all manage our WordPress network differently, one size doesn’t fit all and in this way we’ve tried to cater to different styles of workflow.

We’re always interested in how you work, so if you have any suggestions on what other approaches or features you’d like to see, please feel free to let us know in the comments sections below.