Earlier this year, I migrated my WordPress websites from Bluehost to Opalstack. The Bluehost model was “managed hosting”, and I was able to create new sites through a Bluehost dashboard with “one click”. The Opalstack model had a dashboard setup for WordPress, but it was a little more complicated, and some of it was overwritten (I think) when I migrated some of my sites.
I had been seeing notices recently when I logged into my main personal site about a new version of WordPress, but the site admin panel did not offer a way to do that. I remember being able to do this easily when my sites were hosted on Bluehost. I decided to try installing a plugin to help with this. I ended up trying two plugins (WP Auto Updater and Easy Updates Manager), but I was not able to perform any setting updates for those plugins. Instead, I got the message “Sorry, you are not allowed to access this page”. Hmph!
After a Claude session, I discovered that there were some settings in wp-config.php that could prevent a WordPress site from updating. I found the following lines:
define(‘DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT’, true);
define(‘DISALLOW_FILE_MODS’, true);
Claude recommended changing the setting value from true to false. Once I did that, I was able to see an “Updates” menu item in my Dashboard menu. I then updated the WordPress install and plugins. Whew! Glad I was able to figure that out! I then reviewed my other WordPress sites, and found that most of them had been auto-updating. There was only one other site where I had to update wp-config.php. Ah, the joys of maintenance!