This has been asked a few times before, and it’s been shot down all of those times for a few big reasons. The biggest reason of all is this…
What happens if one of the updates breaks your site? It happens quite a lot because not ever plugin plays well with every other plugin in the world, and sometimes there’s jsut errors in latest veriosns. if this happens you won’t know that your site is broken. It could be down for days, weeks or months (depending on how often you check) before you have any idea that there was any problem at all. On top of that, you won’t have any idea of which update actually caused the problem as it could have been anything that was updated.
I don’t know about you, but the last thing I want is one of our clients calling me upset about their site being down and no one telling them why. I’d much prefer to have it so that if anything does break it’s me that’s done it and it’s mea that knows what I did and what I need to do to get it back to where it should be.
I hear you – but it’s not as though we don’t experience error issues already, and we still find a way through. There would be more often than not that everything would be ok.
The need to update is too frequent for this not to be a useful feature – at least as an option.
You haven’t had many that many things break on you before, have you? 😉
You are right in saying that it’s useful in some cases. In most cases it’s open to problems. There’s 1,000’s of posts on here about problems after upgrading – either plugins don’t interact properly, or a plugin/theme hasn’t been updated to work with the newer version of WordPress and it breaks something. If you’re running a single personal site, this isn’t to bad. When you’re administering 30-40 commercial sites that all have the ability to crash at the same time from automatic updates… that’s a very different point of view.
If there was a guarantee that everything would play nicely, then sure, let it upgrade automatically. If that can’t be guaranteed I’d prefer to spend that extra time myself to ensure that my sites don’t go down.
