With the launch of FlowMattic 7.1.0, there have been loads of new features I have yet to truly investigate, but one of the stellar updates for me was the update to the patcher system, which has been with us since version 6.0
They added some CLI commands to allow remote updates to patches, to apply patches, and to work with patches in this file; a quicker adminer search was enough for me to begin on my next internal tool, a patcher extension for MainWP.
MainWP
I am currently working on a couple of MainWP tools, and I have a few which are publicly available; this is how I update my sites. I have a few dashboards to manage different groups of sites, and this is part of my overall stack. My lab sites are all connected to one dashboard, and a few of my other sites and client sites are connected to another dashboard.
MainWP is really extensible, and they have really good documentation on making extensions https://mainwp.dev/
The Build
This build was a little more extensive than I’ve done before, but most of what I needed I had achieved over various plugins, so repeating it should be possible. I wanted to be able to sync all my flowmattic sites’ patches to my dashboard and be able to apply them individually or in bulk. It had to work with the standard mainWP workflow, so this would handle execution and syncing and most importantly, I wanted a single plugin only, not a child or dashboard plugin this time; I wanted easy to maintain.
After about 6 hours, I had a fully working version 1.0. The irony for me is that the PHP and the code were working and tested after about an hour of development, but as always, the UX/UI and JS always take me way more time, as they are not where my best skills lie, but I got there in the end I was able to tie it into the overview page as below
As well as having a single details page to manage individual sites
And this was one of the most satisfying parts for me once I distributed it across my site network
Twenty updates done in a matter of seconds on 4 sites :)
Distribution and Installs
I am not planning on releasing this plugin; it’s an internal tool, so distribution and updates were not too much of a problem, but using UUPD, they would be a breeze anyway. As it’s for me and my sites only, I decided to use my utility plugin.
Stage 1
All sites with flowmattic on using the MainWP plugin tab. I also selected and pushed it to those sites so it was installed on them all, so installing it took about 50 seconds using MainWP.
Stage 2
My utility plugin allows me to update any plugin from my own independent repo, and it also has a function that allows me to release an update to it and remove/add plugins to use this repo in bulk, so this is what I decided to do. I increased the run reference to today’s date, added a new plugin update requirement and pushed this to my repo. Now anywhere this is installed will automatically enable updates for mainwp-flowmattic-patcher to my own update repo.
Stage 3
Once the update has reached all my sites, they will automatically enable this plugin as one to update from my repo and then any update would be as simple as adding a new version to my repo, and it will appear in MainWP all in one motion.
Stage 4
Moving forward, all updates will be served as usual by my repo and will be sendable from my terminal with a simple CLI command or right-click
In the video below, you can see the full plugin in action
