On the CMS Commander “Plugins” page you can remotely manage plugins on all your websites at the same time. That includes activating and deactivating used plugins, installing new plugins on several sites and updating all plugins at the same time. This article refers only to plugins, see here for managing and updating themes with the “Themes” page.
The “Plugins” page is split into three tabs which you can choose at the top of the page:
On the first “View / Edit” tab you can activate and deactivate plugins on your websites as well as install available plugin updates.
- To update all your plugins on all your websites select “Update All Plugins” from the “Bulk Actions” dropdown, then select all your websites in the “Your Sites” list and press “Apply”.
For more specific actions load the plugins data from one of your sites first by clicking the “Load Content” button next to a site in the sitelist. After that, in the resulting list of plugins you can activate or deactivate individual plugins on the site loaded from by clicking the respective links next to the plugins name.
For bulk actions select any number of plugins from the list and click on the “Bulk Actions” dropdown field. Here you have a choice of different actions, including activating or deactivating all selected plugins on the site loaded from, updating all selected plugins (either on the site loaded from or on any number of other sites you select in the list) or copying all the plugins to another one of your sites. After making your selection click “Apply” to process it.
Plugins loaded from a WP site with view of the bulk actions.
Installing New WordPress Plugins
To bulk install WordPress plugins to your sites navigate to the “Install Plugin (WordPress)” tab. There you have four choices where to install the new plugin from:
- From Favourites: Select and install plugins from the favourites you have set in CMS Commander. Once you have created a list of favourites this is the quickest and easiest way to install plugins. I would recommend you to save all the plugins you regularly use as favourites, so that you can easily bulk install them all on a new WordPress website you set up.
You can add a plugin as favourite on all three other installation choices, “From WordPress Plugin Directory”, “From URL” as well as “From Your Computer”. On each of the choices tabs you can find a link or checkbox to mark a plugin as favorite. Favorites selected on the “From Your Computer” will be uploaded and stored (but not shared with anyone else) in CMS Commander to allow you easy access. - From WordPress Plugin Directory: Search the thousands of plugins listed in the official WordPress plugin directory for any keyword. After submitting the search form the results are displayed in a table below and you have the choice to add a plugin as favourite (see above) or install it on the current website. To install several of the plugins in the result simply select their checkboxes, then select the sites of your choice in the “Your Sites” list and click “Install on selected Sites” at the bottom of the page.
- From URL: For plugins not listed in the WP plugin directory, i.e. premium plugins, you can provide a web address (URL) to the plugins .zip file to install it on your websites. After entering the URL simply select the sites you want to install the plugin on from the “Your Sites” list and click the “Install on selected Sites” button. You can also enter multiple URLs at the same time, with one on each line in the form box, to install all those plugins simultaneously.
- From Your Computer: This option lets you select a plugin .zip file that you have saved locally to your computer. After selecting the file it will get uploaded and you can install the plugin to any number of your WordPress weblogs simultaneously. If you check “Add Plugin File to Favourites” your .zip file will be stored in CMS Commander to allow you easy access in the future.
For each of the four choices there are two additional settings: “Activate Installed Plugins” tells CMS Commander to immediately activate the new plugin on your blog after installation while “Overwrite Existing” means that a folder of the same name (could be an old version for example) would get overwritten with the plugin you chose to install now.
Search results from the WP plugins directory to install on your websites.
Installing New Drupal Modules
To bulk install modules to your Drupal websites navigate to the “Install Module (Drupal)” tab. There you need to enter the web address (URL) to a .zip file that contains the module you want to install. Optionally you can also enter a custom name for the project. When finished select the Drupal sites you want to install the new module on from the “Your Sites” list and click the “Install” button.
