Chris Jean

Can you confirm that the zip file you supplied does in fact contain a style.css file? The message comes from WordPress and not the plugin, so the message is saying that WordPress unzipped the file contents and did not find a style.css file inside.

I think the hardest part will be a quick and cheap way of identifying when a plugin’s trunk is newer than the currently-installed plugin. Good luck.

As you point out, if you have the zip of it, you certainly can. By default, no, I don’t know of any existing setting or plugin that makes this automatic.

Internally, WordPress tracks the active theme and active plugins by path, such as akismet/akismet.php for a plugin or xmpl-theme for a theme. You can test this by renaming an active plugin’s directory and loading up the Plugins page in your dashboard. You’ll see a message stating the plugin was deactivated since it could not be found (I should note that this forced deactivation only happens when that page is loaded when the directory no longer exists; you can remove the directory, play around with the site, put the directory back, and it will remain active). Similarly, if you rename the active theme directory, the site will revert automatically to the default theme.

Since I work on the command line, my typical upgrade technique for both themes and plugins is as follows:

$ cd wp-content/plugins
$ mkdir temp
$ cd temp
$ wget https://example.com/example.zip
$ unzip example.zip
$ mv ../example example.old && mv example ..

I like to chain together the last two commands with && so that if the first one fails, the second doesn’t run. It also ensures that the there is a minimal amount of time where the plugin or theme doesn’t exist.

Your technique is very similar to what I personally use when I need to update plugins that can’t be automatically updated, so it works perfectly well. It is also similar to what this plugin does behind the scenes.

This plugin was created due to the following two realities:

• WordPress does not support upgrading a plugin or theme by uploading an updated zip file. When doing this, WordPress says that the plugin or theme already exists and refuses to install the upgrade.
• Most WordPress users are more comfortable using an interface in the WordPress dashboard than they are with unzipping files and using FTP or some similar file utility in order to upload the the plugin or theme files.

At iThemes, we tell people to use this plugin since users have far fewer issues using it than using the manual upgrade guide we used to send people to by default. I’m sure that other authors recommend that people use this plugin for the same reason.

tl;dr: It’s easier to point people to this plugin than it is to educate every user about how unzipping works, how theme and plugin directories work, how FTP or their specific host’s file management software works, where plugins and themes live, and how to handle edge cases when things go wrong.

Yes, you will need to download the file first.

It’s a theme zip just like any other theme zip. Install it in the same way you installed the update you downloaded from the theme provider.

The plugin attempts to create a backup of the theme before the upgrade takes place. The location of this backup file is given after the upgrade is complete. If you did not take note of that location, you can find it by looking in your site’s wp-content/uploads directory. The backup file’s name follows this pattern: canvas-VERSION-RANDOM.zip where “VERSION” is the old version and “RANDOM” is randomly generated text.

Assuming that this backup is present, you can “upgrade” to the backup version to restore the old theme.

This typically happens when you are trying to install a plugin using the theme installer.

If you are trying to install a plugin, go to Plugins > Add New in your site’s Dashboard. Then click the “Upload Plugin” button at the top of the page next to the “Add Plugins” header.

Sorry for the confusion Leanne. A critical security vulnerability was found in the plugin. In order to prevent this vulnerability from compromising sites once the vulnerability was known publicly, we worked with the www.ads-software.com security team to have vulnerable versions automatically updated.

In other words, this is not a feature of the plugin. It is something that the www.ads-software.com security team can do in order to ensure that critical security vulnerabilities on sites are quickly patched. This is only done rarely and when the www.ads-software.com security team believes the vulnerability to be big enough to warrant the automatic update.

You can find further details about the vulnerability and the updates in our announcement post.

In that case, I don’t think it would be possible to know exactly why this happened.

When WordPress reverts back to a default theme, this most often happens when the theme that was active is missing. This means that the directory where the theme was (such as “Superba”) no longer exists.

One way that this could happen without there actually being an error is if the theme’s directory was renamed. For example, if the theme’s original directory was “Superba” and was changed to “Superba-Custom”. This would create an issue because the zip file would contain the directory “Superba”. When the upgrade takes place, the “Superba-Custom” directory is removed and a “Superba” directory is added. The end result would be that the theme would be upgraded, but WordPress would revert to the default theme, requiring you to manually activate the Superba theme again.

It sounds like the theme files were not fully upgraded or that the process was halted in the middle of the upgrade.

If you have access to the server’s error logs, see if you can find any errors for the time that this issue occurred during.

All hosting has a maximum limit on the size of files uploaded to sites. It sounds like the theme zip that you are uploading exceeds the maximum limit for your hosting. Your options are to manually upgrade the theme using FTP or similar file management tool or to see if your hosting can increase the maximum file size limit.

I believes that you are posting this issue in the wrong place. This is for issues with the Easy Theme and Plugin Upgrades plugin, which does not have a settings page.

For those that are having issues with WordPress 4.0 and this plugin, I’m unable to recreate this issue. I’ll need to get additional information in order to find out what may be happening. Please give me as many details as you can. For example:

* Are you seeing the drop-down that the plugin adds to the installation page to select “Yes” in order to perform the upgrade?
* Are any warning messages about the update not being able to be applied showing?

As for your issue fvokovan, the easiest thing to do is to use FTP to rename the theme’s directory. This will force WordPress to use the default theme so that you can access the site normally. From there, update the theme however you like.