An easy way to keep plugins and themes updated in multiple WordPress installations

In this article: Introduction, Prerequisites, How my file system is structured, Creating the repositories, Linking to the repositories, Recap, Common problems and fixes, Maintaining your repositories, Using this technique with ZenPhoto and other CMS systems, Additional resources, Comments and feedback

Introduction

WordPress is a wonderful blogging platform and, in certain situations, a good choice for a general content management system (CMS). It is easy to end up with several parallel installations of WordPress—one for each major topic you want to discuss. Everything works great at first, but after a while, the constant barrage of updates to the main application, various plug-ins, and the themes becomes something of a management nightmare. The more blogs you operate, the more time is spent maintaining the blogging environment and the less that is available to actually blog.

If you host your WordPress blog on a Linux-based server (BSD or most any other Unix-like operating system should be able to do this equally well) and you have “shell access”, I might have a way to ease your pain. In a nutshell, you will create a central repository containing every WordPress plug-in that you use in all of your blogs. You create a separate repository containing each of your themes. Next, you create symbolic links (think of them as shortcuts; more about them in just a moment) from each installation of WordPress to your central repositories. From that point on, you only have to update your plug-ins and themes once, and the change will take effect instantly across all your sites. It’s a very slick trick!

This trick works probably works well on many other CMS systems that use plug-ins and themes; I have started using it with my ZenPhoto installations, too. In addition to helping keep things updated, it also saves disk space since you are only maintaining a single copy of the files on your server.

I will provide step-by-step instructions and some quirks for which you need to be aware. One quick word of caution: mistakes, bugs, and goofs can also instantly affect all your sites, so be very careful as you work, take your time, and always backup your files and databases before you start.
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