Almost two weeks ago WordPress’ Dion Hulse announced that WordPress 3.7 will include automatic core updates. In his supporting blog Dion goes onto explain how this highly anticipated feature will work in the forthcoming release.
Automatic (Background) Security updates coming to #WordPress 3.7. http://t.co/p54XLAkUnH
— Dion Hulse (@dd32) September 24, 2013
WordPress’ continued popularity world-wide has unfortunately been matched by the attention given by hackers to exploit security vulnerabilities. Google’s Head of Web Spam – Matt Cutts tweeted a great blog on Friday about why WordPress is a popular target:
In case you needed more reasons to keep your web server software up to date: http://t.co/Ub7S6haaDq
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) October 4, 2013
It’s not surprising then why the WordPress team are about to introduce Automatic Core Updates. It’s worth noting however that the auto-updates will only be for security patches (i.e upgrading from 3.7 to 3.7.1) and will not automatically upgrade 3.7 to 3.8. Auto Core Updates look as though they’ll be enabled by standard when 3.7 is released, however the following line can be added to your wp-config.php to disable it:
define( 'AUTOMATIC_UPDATER_DISABLED', true );