Right now the way our plugins are added is via /wp-admin/ direct upload or search & download from WP public repo from within /wp-admin/. Our custom-developed plugins have to be zipped locally and uploaded via the /wp-admin/ along with any premium plugins.
Updates to plugins work as follows:
- any public plugin updates automagically within /wp-admin/ as it normally would/should - this is fine.
- any premium plugin we obtain has their own, or similar, updating process - this is fine.
- our custom-developed plugins are where the issues comes in. In order to update them, we have to zip locally and upload and pray WordPress extracts that and replaces the older plugin files/dir properly. This has caused issues; especially needing to do any rollbacks in versioning or if there's an error it can take down the site and we have no way, aside from contacting S&F, to fix the problem quickly.
Ideally we'd have:
- public plugins still search and install/activate from WP repo like we have it now
- premium plugins are still uploaded via wp-admin as they are now and those update via the normal wordpress plugin update in admin
- custom-developed plugins, we've build and are version controlled in our site repo, would automagically copy/overwrite/write from the repo dir structure to the wp-content/plugins/ directory during build pipeline and any changes we push are simply included in the build process.