WordPress 3.7 dropped last week and includes a few cool new features—the most controversial being auto-updates.
As nice as it is for WordPress to autoupdate itself, especially for those quick, easy and little security updates, the ability to test your plugins and themes before making larger upgrade, has been a usual workflow for many WordPress users. If your website breaks, you simply wait for the problematic theme or plugin to update or you have a little time to make a change before making the jump. Updating your WordPress a few weeks after a new version has dropped isn’t any big deal.
With this new feature, however, this strategy goes to the wayside. In the end, this will put more pressure on WordPress developers to test with RC and bleeding edge releases of WordPress for testing purposes, so proper theme and plugin updates have been made prior to WordPress auto updating.
That being said, here is a quick WordPress update tip, as manually updating WordPress will soon be a thing of the past.
Unused Themes & Plugins
As I jumped into my WordPress Admin to update some plugins, I realized I had some unused themes.
In fact, I would venture to say that many WordPress users have these themes floating around in their WordPress install:
Do you see what I’m talking about?
(No. Not the tired Standard 2 Theme—stop teasing me.)
Twenty Thirteen and Twenty Twelve.
How many times have you updated these themes that you don’t use?
Or have you left them completely un-updated?
Either way, leaving unused themes and plugins laying around in your WordPress install is never a good idea. They can be a security threat and leaving extra junk lying around will only slow your site down, anyway (although probably not noticeably).
So, as you manually update WordPress for probably one of the last times in your life, do yourself a favor and delete all those unused plugins and themes. Just like a freshly cleaned workplace makes you feel good, so does a nicely updated and cleaned-up WordPress Admin.
What do you think of the new auto update feature?
Speak your mind...