WordShell has good support for third party plugins. However, WordShell needs to be informed about their existence to work properly. With plugins available from the WordPress plugins directory, this is not necessary – because WordShell can look them up in the directory.
If you install a new third party plugin directly using WordShell, then WordShell will know about that plugin in future. It will keep a copy of the plugin, so that it knows what the unmodified plugin looks like; and it will know that this version of the plugin is available, and can be used as an update for other sites that have earlier versions of the same plugin.
Example of installing a new third party plugin:
wordshell mysite myplugin --install --new=path/to/myplugin-1.0.3.zip
Note that you can also install a plugin that you downloaded from WordPress.Org this way. If you do so, then it will over-ride the WordPress.Org version. This allows you to make custom modifications to WordPress.Org versions; once you have imported a modified version like this, it will always be used in preference to the WordPress.Org version.
Where a plugin is third party, when you list it it will show with (-) next to its name. e.g.
wordshell mysite myplugin --list
Example output:
mysite myplugin (-) 1.0.3 My Plugin
You can also list all your site’s third party plugins, by listing with the –listonlythirdparty switch. e.g.
wordshell mysite --list --listonlythirdparty
Limitations of third party plugins
WordShell will not automatically know about available updates to third party plugins, or where to download them from. You need to download them yourself. You can then either install directly (using –new and indicating where to find the plugin, e.g. –new=/home/me/myplugin-1.3.4.zip), or you can copy the plugin into WordShell’s internal directory (e.g. cp /home/me/myplugin-1.3.4.zip ~/.wordshell/customimports.plugin). Furthermore, WordShell can only show the developer’s changelog and descriptions (–changelog and –description switches) for plugins from the WordPress directory, not third party ones. Otherwise, third party plugins work with all other WordShell features (e.g. installing, updating, version comparison, change management, versioning and backup/rollback/restore, etc.).
Read next:
- Next chapter: Working with themes
- Previous section: Dealing with changes/custom modifications to plugins
- Index for this chapter: Working with plugins
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