As you’ve probably heard if you’re a WordPress user (or even if you’re not), WordPress 2.9 has been released, and one of the things people seem most excited about is the ability to upgrade plugins in a batch, instead of one at a time. I wanted to try this out on another domain, and went looking for the upgrade function in what seemed to me to be like the logical location, the Plugins section. I was surprised (and annoyed) to find out that it wasn’t there.
After clicking through Plugins, and all the subcategories under Settings, I turned to Google to find the answer to where this elusive new feature was hiding. It turns out that someone at Automattic thought that placing the feature under Tools > Upgrade made more sense. I thought about this for awhile, I mean really thought about it, and the best that I could come up with is that someone figured that because upgrading a plugin doesn’t count as an add-on, but rather as a core feature of WordPress’ system, that it made more sense to place this “tool” with the other system tools.
The only problem with that is that there’s already a well-defined area in the system hierarchy that is labeled “Plugins”, and this area gives of a far more intuitive information scent than the “Tools” area.
Below is a short video of the Plugin upgrade in progress. As you can see, the upgrade itself is fairly seamless, even if it was a little hard to find.