[wp-edu] Removing Plugins

[Juliana Perry]

Our more manual process for blogs.brynmawr.edu goes something like: 
1) identify plugin to remove 
2) check in WP database which blogs have the plugin activated 
3) determine if plugin was actually used on those blogs (we have had some users who will just activate all available plugins to see what they do), and if so, how it affects the blogs/if it can be extricated 
4) If it seems reasonable to remove, remove plugin on test server 
5) See if the blog(s) are broken 
6) if not, remove in production 


For plugin or theme removals that affect large numbers of blogs, we do the same thing we do for upgrades to spot check for problems-- review blogs on a list of high priority (college news, blogs used for classes, etc) blogs, and those that are typical examples of use of all remaining themes and plugins. If none of those are broken, we're probably okay. This method has gotten us through a lot of cleanup and a couple of upgrades successfully. 


I thought I'd share this in case others aren't set up for automated testing. 


FYI: Catherine Farman and I talked more about cleaning up and maintaining a large multisite install, and consolidating/revising homegrown themes and plugins, at edUi and WordCamp last year-- the slides are here if anyone is interested: http://2012.philly.wordcamp.org/2012/10/27/slides-presentations/ (and I believe the WordCamp talk is on wordpress.tv ). 


Best, 
Juliana Perry 


--- 
Juliana Perry 
Web Services Project Manager 
Bryn Mawr College 
610-526-7554 

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Message: 1 
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:26:29 +0000 
From: "Skriloff, Nicholas" <SkriloffN at darden.virginia.edu> 
Subject: [wp-edu] Removing Plugins 
To: "wp-edu at lists.automattic.com" <wp-edu at lists.automattic.com> 
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<CA12CBE4F4AC324FBE1668F44FF17FD61FC3A1 at EXCH1.darden.virginia.edu> 
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Here at Darden Business School we have our faculty blogs: http://blogs.darden.virginia.edu/ . Overtime some plugins that were once used are no longer used. We have a staging environment that is copy of our production environment. In our staging environment we want to run a process like 

1) Identify plugin to remove 

2) Run a test (like a selenium test) against all blogs 

3) Remove said pluging 

4) Run test again 

5) If nothing broke, the add it to the list of plugins that can be removed from production. 

How have any of you all done this? 

Sincerely, 
Nick Skriloff , ME , MCP, SCJP 
Information Technology Specialist 
Darden Information Services 
Voice 434 243 5025 Fax 434 243 2279 
skriloffn at darden.virginia.edu 
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