Add a dedicated way to upload plugins, bypassing WP repo loading

Context

ClassicPress users are increasingly uploading plugins manually. When doing this you have to load the whole WP plugin repo page (which takes 4-5 seconds and shows many plugins as incompatible), then do another step to get to the upload panel.

We are now getting a lot of CP-specific options available and it makes no sense to me to still be forcing this WP step every time you want to load a plugin. I also feel that changing this could be a good first step in making the WP-plugin system not so “in your face”.

Possible implementation

I would like to go straight to a simple upload plugin screen with a button at the top (browse plugins) that would take you to the normal plugin-install.php page.

There would be a new sub-menu item (Upload) to call this page.
new-menu

If you go to the plugins page there would be two buttons, one for the upload screen and the normal one for the WP repo.

plugins page

Will you be able to help with the implementation?

Yes.

EDIT: An extra file is unnecessary. It is much simpler. Just adding the links I mentioned and calling plugin-install.php?tab=upload does everything exactly the way I imagined. It bypasses the WP repo loading and goes straight to a dedicated upload screen with a “browse” button. So this is already a feature that is built into CP… we just need to add a few links so we can call it direct from the admin area.

If people think this is a good idea I can do a PR.

I like the idea, but I would recommend doing it with a bit more subtlety since we want to keep version 1.x instantly familiar.

Add the Upload button and menu item, but keep original Add New items because those are in WP and the UI items that would be instantly familiar to the users.

This whole process will need to be revised in version 2.0 because we plan to keep WP repo integration and add CP directory integration. For now, I think this would make CP users’ lives a little easier to quickly go to upload page to upload CP plugin without modifying existing UI elements that might confuse new users. Hope that makes sense.

5 Likes

Yes, fine with that. So we would just be adding 2 new upload links as below. Everything else stays the same and “familiar”.

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Yes, I like that.

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I’m good with this, @Core_Committers thoughts?

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Yesss!

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7 votes, let’s open a PR and we can continue the discussion there :+1:

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Done!

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Great idea. Nice easy win for everyone. I have been annoyed by this also, but never thought to try to improve it.

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Thanks. Turned out to be super easy to get it working. And it’s something that has annoyed me long before CP was even born. So it’s great to be able to finally get a solution.

4 Likes

This is going to be part of the 1.4.0 release, so I’m updating the petition to reflect that and will close the thread to free up the votes.

Thanks @ozfiddler for a great petition and the pull request to implement it, and thanks everyone for voting.

6 Likes

This is a good new feature, though personally I wouldn’t be using it. For security reasons, my webhost doesn’t like it for a CMS to be able to change/upgrade itself (that is, via the web interface), and so my file and directory permissions are restrictive, and I manually install or upgrade core/theme/plugins using SFTP and the command line.

It is a pain, but worth it, I think, in terms of enhanced security…

1 Like

I do the same on most of the sites I manage. However, this approach isn’t suitable for the majority of users.

The code to hide the “Upload” and “Add New” buttons is pretty simple, and this may be worth doing for sites with restricted permissions since they won’t work under this setup. I should consider this for a couple of sites I manage also.

1 Like

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