I am incredibly proud to announce that WP Rollback, a plugin initially developed nearly 10 years ago as part of a WordCamp plugin development contest, has hit 300,000 active installs on WordPress.org. 🎉
This makes me incredibly proud to have helped the community by providing a valuable tool to get admins out of a pinch.
Wait… What is WP Rollback?
WP Rollback allows you to rollback (or forward) any WordPress.org-hosted plugin or theme. The most common use case is when new updates create a conflict between your theme or another plugin.
Many people don’t know how to rollback plugins and themes or want a quicker way than manually downloading a zip file and uploading it via FTP.
While it’s considered best practice to always keep your WordPress plugins and themes updated, we understand there are times you may need to quickly revert to a previous version. This plugin makes that process as easy as a few mouse clicks. Simply select the version of the plugin or theme that you’d like to rollback to, confirm, and in a few moments you’ll be using the version requested. No more fumbling to find the version, downloading, unzipping, FTPing, learning Subversion or hair pulling.
WP Rollback README.txt
… and, people really like WP Rollback:
New UI, Branding, and Website for Version 2.0
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while… late last year (2023), I had some free time and decided to rewrite the plugin frontend using React to provide a more modern interface.
I think it looks pretty good in comparison:
My goal for the UI refresh was to provide additional information to the user, such as the author’s name, a link to their profile, the last update date, etc., so that they can make a more informed decision about rolling back a plugin or theme.
New Website and Branding
WP Rollback has never had a website or actual brand. After its initial release, I did some work to maintain it over the years, but it mostly stayed in its working state year after year.
If you look at the old logo, it’s almost positive that it violates the WordPress trademark. I figured if it stayed like this for too long then the WP.org team would shut it down and issue me a cease-and-desist. Nobody wants that. Chalk it up to me being a naive 20-something-year-old when that was created, but it was long overdue for an update.
Now, I’m not the best at branding and logo creation, so I have to admit the icon used for this logo is primarily borrowed from a Figma community project with some minor color enhancement and shape tweaks. The text uses the Geist Variable font family from Vercel, a very modern and new-style font.
What do you think?
The WP Rollback Website
As part of the branding, I managed to secure wprollback.com for the website.
The current website is a landing page for me to gauge interest in the plugin. I plan to build a complete website that will provide information such as documentation, a feature overview, videos, and a release notes section.
Here’s what the landing page looks like:
What’s on the Roadmap?
I plan to continue working on the plugin as time permits. I enjoy giving back to the WordPress community through WP Rollback, but you know… time is finite.
As time permits, I plan on releasing the next big feature:
Premium Plugin Rollbacks
Premium (or Pro) plugin and theme support have been the most common feature requests since we originally released the plugin. I have developed a working branch of Pro plugin rollbacks on GitHub. However, it works slightly differently from WordPress.org plugins.
How Pro plugin rollbacks will work: When you have WP Rollback active, we will store the version of your premium plugin or theme installed when you perform updates. You can adjust the number of versions to store, so a new settings page needs to be created.
Welcome New Contributors
I am developing this project, and there are no other contributors at the time of this writing. Thankfully, Matt Cromwell is helping me support the few requests we get occasionally.
If you’re interested in helping, we welcome any contribution to development or support. GitHub is a great place to start.
The future is bright for WP Rollback. It has been a fun and rewarding project that has met the test of time.
