PiXELWiT

The WordPress plugin called “PlugInstaller” by H.R. Schaefer is an excellent concept come to fruition. PlugInstaller makes installing a plugin as easy as pointing to a web address (or a file on your hard drive) and pressing the “install” button. You no longer need to download, decompress, upload and activate your plugins. It turns a 4-step multi-application process into a one-click-command issued from the WordPress user interface. Pretty nice. But wait there’s more!

PlugInstaller also checks the WordPress.org database for newer versions of your plugins and provides an option for one-click updating. Brilliant! And if that wasn’t enough, PlugInstaller revamps the plugins management page to display all plugins in a space-saving expandable list which incorporates a link to uninstall (delete) inactive plugins as well as a link to every plugin’s “ReadMe” file.

I’ve installed quite a few plugins and now that I’ve added PlugInstaller, managing them all is a cinch.

Reasons to install PlugInstaller:

• Greatly simplifies the plugin installation process.
• Sleek new Plugins Management page.
• Ability to uninstall/delete inactive plugins.
• New “Deactivate All” plugins feature.
• Quickly access each plugin’s ReadMe file.
• Lists and manages broken or incompatible plugins.

Things to watch out for:

• The installation requires ‘tar’, ‘gzip’ and ‘unzip’ to be installed and readily available from the search path, which seems a bit “technical” for a plugin mostly geared to helping non-technical people.
• Pluginstaller didn’t like managing plugins which were “unnecessarily” nested within a subfolder of the “plugins” directory. I had to deactivate them and FTP them to the root of the plugins folder before PlugInstaller could handle the update process.
• Not all plugins are standardized and therefore may not support all PlugInstaller features.
• Though it detects plugins which need updating, pressing the “Check for Updates” button causes an error for me.

All in all, a great plugin to install and update plugins.

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