The other day I posted an update to the Schedule Posts Calendar plug-in, which was the first update to a plug-in I have done.  There were a few gotcha’s that I ran in to…

Tag Names

If you don’t know, WordPress plug-in’s can be hosted at the main WordPress site, which then allows them to appear in the WordPress searches and updates.  However you have to follow their standards and if you don’t read carefully, updates may not work.

This is the case with SVN tag names.  If you want to use SVN tags to manage versions of your plugin you have to keep the new tag names to be simple version numbers.  No other characters can be included in the tag name.

This caught me off guard as it is only mentioned in the FAQ and my traditional naming for tags includes if the version was a full release or an RC, etc.  Anyway, I re-tagged everything and resolved the issue.

readme.txt

WordPress uses the /trunk/readme.txt file to determine the current release based upon the tag names.  This is fine but once the update is done, it actually uses the version number found in the main PHP file to display the version to the user on the main page.

I forgot to update the version tag in the PHP file, so while you could download the new version, it would show up in WordPress.org and your local install as the old version.

Again, a pretty simple fix, I updated the PHP file and then re-tagged the new version once again.

Conclusion

It’s always fun learning a new system that isn’t very well documented 😉

I found a nice article on updating a plugin that helped in resolving my issue.