Maintaining updates for a bunch of WordPress sites with Google Spreadsheets
Max Glenister
Here’s a useful trick I’ve come up with, to maintain a list of WordPress installations and easily see if they’re up to date.
Getting the currently installed version
Create a sheet with your domain names
In the second column, you’ll want a formula that uses ImportXML() to grab the /feed/ for each domain, and then use REGEXEXTRACT() to extract the version number:
=REGEXEXTRACT(ImportXML(CONCATENATE($A2,"/feed/"), "//generator"),"\?v=(.*)$")
This will give us, for example 4.2.1 from the <generator> field in the /feed/.
Checking against the latest release
Create a new empty sheet, then in cell A1 paste the following:
=IMPORTHTML("https://wordpress.org/download/release-archive/", "table", 1)
This will populate the sheet with the release data from the WordPress wiki. We only need the data in cell A2.
Go back to your first sheet and in a new column, you can add a test to see if the installed version is greater than or equal to the latest release. This will give you TRUE or FALSE.
=GTE($C2, Sheet2!$A$2)
You can view a working version of this spreadsheet on Google Drive
Mentioned elsewhere on this site
- PHP2Shell and the case for building boring sites
By 2015 I was tracking which sites were behind on updates in a Google spreadsheet, which tells you how well that scaled.
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