Nerve Endings Firing Away

The latest versions of WordPress have a nifty and useful feature. Not only do you get notifications in your Dashboard when there is a new upgrade released for the Core but also tiny blurb notifications for plugin updates. You get a tiny notification blurb atop the Plugins option on the menubar for number of plugins for which updates are available. And better still, you can upgrade them with a single click from within the Dashboard and not mess around downloading the update and uploading it via FTP. Of course, relevant folders have to be modded with read-write permissions.

But what do you do if you don’t want to upgrade? While you should always upgrade when a new release is available especially the Core, certain plugins are updated with loss in their basic functionality. Case in point – the Permalink Redirect plugin. I used this plugin to redirect page requests when I changed my Permalink structure. The new version of the plugin somehow doesn’t let me enter my old permalink structure and does not redirect it to the new one (tons of errors in my Google Webmaster Tools). Although I could simply ignore the blurb notification on my Dashboard, you can think of me as kinda OCD when I want a clean ‘error-free’ Dashboard with no warning messages. So how did I do that?

I edited the plugin’s main php file and simply edited the version number to the latest version (changed the text 0.8.2 to 1.0). That’s it! WordPress now thinks it is the latest version and does not display the annoying blurb. Since I did not change the code or anything that would mess up the functionality of the plugin, I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong. Editing your plugin files is extremely dangerous so be careful.

WordPress gurus, please let me know if this blasphemy is tolerated :)