Companion Auto Update

Description

Companion Auto Update is a powerful and completely free plugin that allows you to manage all the updates on your WordPress site. Our aim is to give you the best control over these updates and stay in the know at all times.

We understand that you might not always be able to check if your WordPress site has any updates that need to be installed. Especially when you maintain multiple websites keeping them up-to-date can be a lot of work. This plugin can help you with that. We’ll keep your site up-to-date and keep you posted about what’s happening and notify you when we need your help with something.

If you have a feature suggestion or idea you’d like to see in the plugin, we’d love to hear about it! Suggest a Feature

Main features

  1. Auto-updating for plugins, themes, core and translation files
  2. Set at what time you wish to update
  3. Filter plugins and themes to not be updated
  4. E-mail notifications about old software, pending updates and completed updates
  5. An update log with all updates
  6. Option to delay automatic updates with an x number of days

Full control over everything

Full control, that’s what this plugin is all about. With this plugin you can enable (or disable) automatic updating for plugins, themes, WordPress core updates (both minor and major can be changed separately) and for translation files. Don’t want to run the updater for all plugins? Don’t worry, just disable auto updating for the plugins you’d like to skip and we can even notify you when there’s an update for these plugins so you can go and update them yourself.

Scheduling

By default we’ll check for updates twice a day but you can change this to several different options if you’d like. When choosing to update on a daily basis you can even select at what time you’d like it to run. Besides the updaters you can also schedule te notifications, want to update every hour but only recieve notifications once a day? No problem!
Sometimes developers will push an update that will cause errors on your site, they’ll often fix it within a day but if the updater has run in the mean time it can cause all kinds of issues. Now you can choose to delay updates with an x number of days to prevent this from happening.

Know what’s happening

We want you to know what’s happening on your website. This plugin offers settings for various email notifications. We can send you an email when an update is available, when a plugin has been updated or when wordpress has been updated.
But if you don’t want to recieve emails about this you can still log in and view the changelog to see what happened.

Screenshots

  • Full control over what to update and when to recieve notifications
  • Disable auto-updating for certain plugins and/or themes
  • Advanced scheduling options for updating and notifcations
  • Keep track of updates with the update log

Installation

How to install Companion Auto Update

Manual install

  1. Download Companion Auto Update.
  2. Upload the ‘Companion Auto Update’ directory to your ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory.
  3. Activate Companion Auto Update from your Plugins page.

Via WordPress

  1. Search for ‘Companion Auto Update’.
  2. Click install.
  3. Activate.

Settings

Settings can be found trough Tools > Auto Updater

FAQ-e

Check our website for the FAQ

https://codeermeneer.nl/documentation/auto-update/faq-auto-updater/

What features can I expect to see in the future?

Your feedback is what made this plugin what is and what it’ll become so keep the feedback coming! To see what features you’ve suggested and what we’re working on read our blogpost here

What’s the difference between WordPress 5.5 and this plugin?

WordPress 5.5 was released recently and it packs tons of new features. One of those features is auto-updates for plugins and themes. Something Companion Auto Update does too.
So obviously, some of you wondered what the difference would be between the default WordPress method and the one offered by Companion Auto Update and I figured I’d quickly write a blog about it, explaining the differences.

You can read this blogpost here

Reviews

03 December 2023
Most useful. Better than the WP auto-updates feature, as has more control and options; like frequency /how often to check for updates, what should not get updated [great for a plugin that may be problematic, and you want to test via staging before updating it, or the theme]. Thanks for this plugin!
29 May 2023
Great plugin. You need to check your site from time to time because automatic updating can go wrong if a host is not very stable. But that is not the fault of this plugin.
07 February 2023
Just wanted to thank the plugin author, Papin, for all his time and great work o this free plugin. I hope he goes on maintaining it. It was not updated since wp6.0.3 but it works PERFECTLY well, so I assume no need for Papin to unnecessarily waste his time. WP now has auto updates, but sans all the features and fine-tuning this plugin enables.
22 June 2022
I've used this plugin for several years on many, many websites and it has worked absolutely flawlessly. Never a day of trouble from it. And it has saved me unbelievable amounts of trouble. So I really hate that it has come to this - but while it's still working on my WP 6.0 sites, it has not been updated and tested for use with 6.0. I haven't had any trouble with it except I'm getting bombarded with notices each day from all my websites saying I have an "outdated" plugin. It turned out it was this one. This one hasn't been updated in the last 3 months and 6.0 has been out for a month now. That's scaring me that it's no longer being supported so I'm going to be trying something else for now.
Read all 104 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Companion Auto Update” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

“Companion Auto Update” has been translated into 16 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.

Translate “Companion Auto Update” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

3.9.1 (March 8, 2024)

  • Fixed: Undefined variable $totalNum

3.9.0 (February 2, 2024)

  • Fixed: Fatal error during Cron
  • Fixed: PHP deprecated error for PHP 8 and up

3.8.9 (January 9, 2024)

  • Fixed error: Call to undefined function is_plugin_active()

3.8.8 (December 19, 2023)

  • Fixed a few minor bugs
  • Made some performance improvements
  • We now require at least WordPress 5.3

3.8.7.1 (September 28, 2022)

  • Tweak: Extended function_exists check with get_plugins() for the fatal error when trying to send update emails

3.8.7 (September 12, 2022)

  • Fix: Fatal error when trying to send update emails

3.8.6 (August 11, 2022)

  • Tweak: Code optimization for better performance

3.8.5 (March 17, 2022)

  • New: Added more checks on the status page and added an explanation to some of them.
  • New: Added an list of delayed updates on the status page to help with troubleshooting.
  • Tweak: Made some improvements to the update delay feature.
  • Tweak: Added a notice to explain that update delay does not work with WordPress update currently.
  • Tweak: Improved code on the status page to be more reliable.

3.8.4 (February 2, 2022)

  • Tweak: Fixed a few styling errors with WP5.9

3.8.3 (December 9, 2021)

  • New: Plugin update e-mails now have an option to link to a few important pages
  • Fix: Error: Undefined index: dbupdateemails
  • Fix: Error: A non-numeric value encountered

3.8.2 (July 1, 2021)

  • Fix: Error: Call to undefined function get_plugin_updates()

3.8.1 (June 4, 2021)

  • New: Be notified when we need your help updating to a new database version Feature Request
  • Tweak: Made some under the hood performance improvements

3.8.0 (January 14, 2021)

  • New: Better handling of plugins with an unknown WP version
  • New: More intervals for notifications
  • Fix: Call to undefined function errors

3.7.1.1 (November 2, 2020)

  • Fix: Type in wp_next_scheduled

3.7.1 (October 30, 2020)

  • Fix: PHP Warning: strtotime() expects parameter 2 to be integer, string given

3.7 (September 8, 2020)

  • New: Delay updates with an x number of days
  • New: Be notified of plugins that have not been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress.
  • New: Choose to see more info in the emails (like the time at which the update happened)
  • Fix: “Contact for support” button will work again
  • Fix: Fixed a few PHP errors
  • Tweak: Made improvements to the “Fix it” button for the “All automatic updates are disabled” error.
  • Tweak: You can now choose to ignore the “Search Engine Visibility” and “Cronjobs” warnings
  • Tweak: Reports on the Site Health page will only show a summary and point to the status page for more information and possible fixes
  • Tweak: Removed cronjob check and Search Engine Visibility check from site health
  • Tweak: E-mails are now fully translatable
  • Tweak: Renamed Core notifications to WordPress notifications
  • Tweak: WordPress plugin and theme update notifications are now disabled

Also: Check out what features we’re working on at our blogpost

3.6 (August 12, 2020)

  • New: Added an “after core update” hook More info
  • New: Select which userroles can access settings. (Defaults to only administrators)
  • Tweak: Added Theme and Core update method the log
  • Tweak: Few WordPress 5.5 improvements

3.5.5 (August 5, 2020)

  • Fix: Added better multisite support
  • Tweak: We’ve added a bunch more checks to the status page and you can now see more passed checks.
  • Support for WordPress 5.5

3.5.4.1 (June 20, 2020)

  • Fix: Sometimes the hour settings for intervals wouldn’t show up

3.5.4 (June 19, 2020)

  • New: See translations in the update log
  • New: We’ve added a few checks to WordPress’ Site Health page
  • Fix: Error with Companion Auto Update Database Update
  • Fix: Schedule interval duplicates

3.5.3 (June 5, 2020)

  • New: We’re working on a better update log. You should see the Update method (Manual/Automatic) in the log now. (Only works for Plugins right now)
    Please report any issues with this feature over at our sticky post: Problems with the Update method in the new update log?
  • Fix: Not able to see checks in boxes (reverted back to before it all went wrong)
  • Fix: Error date_default_timezone_set(): Timezone ID +00:00 is invalid
  • Tweak: The status tab will no longer show turned-off settings as an error
  • Tweak: Made some improvements to the “Update pending” emails, you can now see a list of all pending updates and go directly to the update page.

3.5.2 (April 1, 2020)

  • Fix: Not able to see checks in boxes

3.5.1 (March 25, 2020)

  • Tweak: You seem to like the new dashboard, we’ve fixed a few issues regarding the responsiveness of the design. We’ve also tweaked the icons to be a bit more transparant.
  • Tweak: We’ve added the release notes link to Plain text emails
  • Tweak: Fixed a few typos
  • Tweak: Various minor security improvements

3.5.0 (March 5, 2020)

  • New: In version 3.4.6 we’ve changed to HTML emails rather than plain text, in this version you can opt to change it back to plain text emails
  • Fix: We’ve ‘fixed an issue where on occasion nothing would update
  • Tweak: Made some improvements to the “Fix it” button for the AUTOMATIC_UPDATER_DISABLED error
  • Tweak: We’ve changed the dashboard, moved both the settings page and de support page to the dashboard. Please let us know if you like this change or not.
  • Bug: We’ve had to (temporarily) disable the theme filter because it was causing issues on some installations. We’ll try to get it working again in a future update.

View full changelog