Destructive update

I am sorry to hear this. WordPress deletes everything inside a plugin directory when it updates, this is standard behaviour, probably to avoid conflicts with old files (garbage). WordPress handles everything related to the update itself. When the update is complete, wordpress will try to activate the plugin, if there is something wrong with the plugin you wouldn’t be able to reactive it (and that’s all that can go wrong (or at least that I could do wrong), a plugin that is not able to reactivate when there is something wrong). I don’t know what exactly happened. Even when the update succeeded, the outcome would have been the same. WordPress would have automatically deleted everything. I found this out the same way you did, it really sucks, I have no control over it. Although I would love to include your translation.

There is nothing I could have done to prevent this, this is standard behaviour (when you update a plugin). I have tested this plugin on 4 different server (3 different linux distro’s and 1 windows setup) setups and the plugin seems to work. I will mark this topic as resolved, because there is nothing I could have done.

Ok, thanks for your answer. May be you should add somewhere that customized po files are deleted on every update ?
Best regards
S.

WordPress checks www.ads-software.com to see if there is a new version. When you click “install”, it downloads the update (trunk from SVN, the whole plugin) as a zip, removes every file in the directory and replaces it by the extracted files.

What I could do is adding a filter that copies the files, before updating, into another folder and then placing them back. But that can create conflicts. How do I merge different PO’s if I have to copy them back and somebody made changes? How do I not overwrite my own update?

I have an idea for the future though. I could create a directory “previous_versions” and copy everything in there and when the installation is done you could copy it back from there. I haven’t looked at it to closely, it just an idea that comes to mind.