Update (17. November 2008): I keep this page here for reference but since WordPress 2.7 there’s a Plugin Installer and even a WordPress Upgrader. This made this plugin obsolete and I won’t spend any time on it any more.

I’ve checked out various plugins for WordPress that might help me to administer my installed plugins and themes. I looked at:

• One Click
• Single Click Plugin Updater
• Update Manager
• WordPress InstantUpgrade plugin
• and some more websites with promising ideas…

I wanted a plugin that could do the following things:

• install, update and delete plugins and themes
• it should be able to handle various locations, i.e. at least these plugin repositories and maybe some from somewhere else.
• basic search functionality for all these plugins and themes

Since I haven’t found something that could do all these things, I wrote the WordPress Extension Manager: a plugin that lets you do all of the above.

You can download the plugin here.

Installation

Unzip the downloaded plugin into your wp-content/plugins directory and activate it on the plugins screen. After that perform the following steps:

1. change the permissions of the wp-content/plugins directory to 0777. Alternatively you can change the owner of this directory to the same user who is running the webserver.
2. do the same thing you did in step 1 with these directories:
   • wp-content/themes
   • extension-manager/plugins
   • extension-manager/themes

Once you’ve done that you can go to Options - Extension Manager and start using the plugin.

Usage

If you go to Options - Extension Manager you’ll be presented with these options:

• Install Plugins
• Install Themes
• Maintenance

These actions will be described in the following sections.

Install plugins and themes

If you’d like to install a plugin or a theme simply hit the corresponding button and you’ll be presented with a list of all plugins or themes. You can use the Plugins per page dropdown list to show more plugins at once; the Next and Previous buttons help you to navigate one page forward or back.

If you’re searching for a plugin enter some search terms and press enter or click the Filter button. The results are plugins or themes that contain one of the words you entered in their name, version, download link or author link. In the future it will be possible to search the tags and maybe the description too.

Maintenance

This page shows all your installed plugins and themes. You can delete installed plugins or themes and if you’ve downloaded them with this plugin you can remove the corresponding downloads too.

If you want to delete a installed plugin or theme please make sure that you’ve deactivated it. In case you don’t care about some clutter in your database just delete the plugin or theme.

Notes

I’ve tested this plugin with WordPress 2.3.x but it should be possible to use it with earlier versions; just give it a try. I’ve only tested this plugin with PHP 5.2.x and if you’re using an earlier version of PHP some things might not work - please let me know and I’ll try to fix it. Alas, this plugin doesn’t work with PHP 4 and probably never will.