Updating Plugins from the WPVIP Dashboard

Our WordPress VIP (WPVIP) site manages plugins through Composer or direct code changes to the wpcomvip/church-law-and-tax repository.

What is Composer?

Composer is a dependency management tool for PHP that allows developers to manage libraries and packages efficiently. It ensures that plugins and dependencies are installed in a consistent manner and can be updated using version constraints defined in a composer.json file.

Updating Plugins

In the WPVIP dashboard, select the environment you want to work in.
In the left menu navigate to Code > Plugins to see the full list of installed plugins and any available updates or security vulnerabilities.
(Note: WPVIP doesn't distinguish between free and paid plugins, you only want to update free plugins via the dashboard.)
Click 'Create Pull Request' next to any free plugin that has a new version available. This will create a pull request in the church-law-and-tax repo.
Inside the pull request the WPVIP bot will scan the code changes and test the build. Once all the checks have successfully completed, you can merge the changes.
On merge the CircleCI actions automatically build and deploy the changes. You can track the deploy progress in the Overview screen in the WPVIP dashboard.