Yes, users can often self-install via Fantastico or similar programs, but what guarantee do you have that they’ll upgrade as soon as new releases become available? Letting users run old versions of web software is a great way to get hacked. This kit lets you take control of users’ installations by checking them out via svn and upgrading them en masse.

At Birdhouse Hosting we use WordPress Mass Management Tools to create all new installations. When WP updates are released, we’re able to upgrade more than 100 WP installations belonging to 80+ users in a few minutes flat.

The kit is designed to be run by root – these are not tools for WordPress end users. The kit assumes basic knowledge of the bash shell.

This kit replaces the old wp-create and wp-mass-upgrade scripts which were distributed separately and are no longer supported. Includes:

wp-create.sh: Super fast way to install WordPress for clients, via subversion. Performs the following tasks:

• Gather installation info
• Create install dir and check out a copy of WordPress
• Create database, db user, set db privs via external .sql file
• Create WP config file
• Create upload dir and set filesystem permissions
• Generate array line for wp-sites.sh

Final setup is done via browser.

wp-mass-upgrade.sh: Iterates through all sites listed in wp-sites.sh, backs up the site’s database, upgrades to a specified version of WordPress, and sends the site owner email announcing the upgrade.

wp-mass-plugins.sh: Generates a list of all active plugins used by all sites on the server. The list can be compared to lists of known-incompatible plugins to help you make decisions about whether to skip any sites on the list.

Download wp-mass-tools 1.1

See the included readme.txt for documentation.

Download Cleancats

Instructions: Unpack this folder to your plugins directory and activate it. Click on the Dashboard and you’ll see a new tab called “NGNO Docs.” Within that, you’ll find documentation I wrote for my authors for one particular site. In order for this to be useful, you’ll need to replace the HTML it contains with your own by editing the file docs.html.

You’ll want to remove the image files I’ve included and, if desired, add your own. Note: I found it tricky to get image paths working – you’ll need to embed images like this:

img src="../wp-content/plugins/wp-workflow-docs/more-result.gif"

You can change the plugin name and tab name by editing the plugin file itself – it’s a tiny plugin and it will be pretty obvious where to do this in the file. Then de-activate and re-activate it to see the new tab name.

Download wp-workflow-docs

Contributions / improvements welcome!

Instructions: Place future-post.php in your plugins directory and activate it. Write a post with a future timestamp and hit publish. Notice that it goes live on your site immediately.

Note: This seemingly simple plugin was graciously written by the magical Ryan Boren when I was facing a deadline. He doesn’t have time to maintain/host it, so I agreed to.

Download version 1.0

Contributions / improvements welcome!

WP-Mass-Upgrade has been folded into the WordPress Mass Management Tools kit.

Currently driving weekly email updates from birdhouse.org and other sites.

About

Sends periodic email notifications of new WordPress blog entries, either in plain text or as formatted HTML, to a separate subscribers mailing list. Records ID of last-sent post. On subsequent runs, sends all posts created since the previous run. Mail is sent to a single email address, which is most likely a separate subscribers mailing list.

The first time WP-Digest is run, it operates on the last n entries made in your blog. After the first run, it will save the ID of your last blog entry in a cache file. On subsequent runs, it will operate on however many entries have been made since the previous run. You can manually control the value of n by changing $MinPosts in conf.php.

Requirements

This script is desgined to be run on Unix/Linux/OS X servers. It may work on Windows servers as well, but has not been tested in that environment. Of course you’ll need to use some alternative to cron if working under Windows.

This script requires access to the lynx web browser installed on your server. To determine whether you have it, type:

which lynx

If the system returns “Command not found” then you don’t have it, and should ask your sysadmin to install it. This script is designed to be run at regular intervals via crontab.

See included readme.txt for setup instructions.

History

2.0: Now sends your choice of plain text or HTML-formatted (multipart) email.

1.2: Completely new architecture, now based on lynx for improved formatting options and an end to problems with incorrectly formatted characters and error messages in output generated by 3rd party plugins when run via cron.

1.1: Bug fixes

1.0: Started as a port of mtblogmail, but quickly turned into a complete rewrite in order to take advantage of the WordPress APIs.

Download

Download wp-digest