Shiny Updates v2

What is Shiny Updates?

With the stated goal of “Hiding the The Bleak Screen of Sadness”, the shiny updates team is working on bringing a smoother experience for managing plugins and themes to WordPress.

Shiny Updates v2 is an effort to continue the shiny updates effort from WordPress 4.2. The original shiny update feature only includes shiny plugin updates. The new version aims to extend this to all aspects of updates, installs, and deletes for plugins, themes in WordPress.

There are numerous screens in the Admin that allow you to install, update, and delete themes, plugins and WordPress itself. Shiny updates is exploring ways to improve their design and especially to offer a better user experience by improving perceived performance and limiting confusing notifications.

What does it do?

The shiny updates plugin currently enables the following features:

• Deleting single plugins, bulk updating and bulk deleting plugins from the plugin page.
• Shiny plugin installs from the plugin install screen: multiple actions can be queued up.
• Shiny theme installs, updates, and deletes, multiple queue-able, including multisite.

What is still being worked on?

Currently the team is brainstorming a complete rethink of the core updates page (update-core.php), working to improve clarity and enable easier Update All functionality. Work on that is happening here: https://github.com/obenland/shiny-updates/issues/5

• Development for bulk plugin action notifications: https://github.com/obenland/shiny-updates/issues/7
• Design for updating themes from the theme card (on top of from details modal): https://github.com/obenland/shiny-updates/issues/54
• Another round of user tests to get more feedback on the new flows.

How can I help?

Anyone can help by testing the plugin! Download and install the plugin, then test out all the shiny features: try installing, updating, and deleting plug7ins and themes, including bulk actions, on both single and multisite. Does everything work as expected? Are there any jarring flows? Missing notifications?

Please report any issues on the Github repository, or drop in the #feature-shinyupdates channel in Slack to ask questions or give feedback. It’s also where we have our weekly chats, on Tuesdays 19:00 UTC. Thank you!

P.S. Props @adamsilverstein for ghost-writing this post.

Shiny Updates v2 by Konstantin Obenland was originally posted at https://make.wordpress.org/core/2016/01/27/shiny-updates-v2/