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WordPress’ automatic updates were failing to update a plugin so we had to go in an investigate.

A client’s website was using Plugin X (name obviously changed) and relied on WordPress’ automatic updates to grab the latest version from the WP Plugin Directory. It’s straight-forward enough and there hadn’t been any issues until a routine maintenance where we manually go in and make sure everything is working as expected. It’s like sending car to the workshop every 5,000km and having them check that everything is in order so that you can continue enjoying your daily drives.

On this occasion we noticed that Plugin X’s version number (as specified in its file) did not match that in the WP Plugin Directory. In fact, the version had been set to a very high value (think 9999) which made WordPress think it was already the latest version of the plugin. This meant we weren’t getting any updates, notably security patches, even though newer versions of the plugin had been released.

We had not changed the plugin version number so fearing the worst we quickly compared the plugin files against clean versions from the WP Plugin Directory and thankfully did not find any malicious code. It was then a simple matter of manually replacing our version of Plugin X with the latest one available and cleaning up some minor design inconsistencies that sprung up with the new CSS.

We have no idea how the plugin version number got changed in such a strange way. We also could not find the official version of our copy of Plugin X despite using contextual clues within its files to compare it against several older versions from the WP Plugin Directory. Our best guess is that the plugin author accidentally pushed an unfinished development version to the WP Plugin Directory and realised their mistake only after we had updated our copy of the plugin.

AI, that is Artificial Intelligence, has been in the news for a while now and we’ve all heard stories of it returning answers that are simply wrong (though I’m sure that will get better with time). Even setting AI aside its common to automate procedures to save time and standardize results. Here at Caveena Solutions we follow SOPs and use custom scripts to perform maintenance on our client’s websites. But we also understand that scripts can fail which is why we always have a human look over things to make sure everything is in order. It takes an experienced eye to know what to look for and a knowledgeable mind to know how to handle it.