Managing WordPress Installations

Opening an instance from the WordPress list gives you its workspace: Overview, Updates, Security and Restore points.

Updates

The Updates view shows the full update surface of the site in one place: core version and available core updates, every plugin and every theme with its current version, whether an update is available, and whether auto-updates are on for it.

From here you can:

• update core, all plugins, all themes, or a specific selection;
• install a plugin or theme (optionally pinning a version, optionally activating it);
• activate, deactivate or delete components;
• turn each component’s auto-update on or off.

Core update policy

Each instance has a core update policy:

Policy	Behaviour
none	No automatic core updates
minor	Security and maintenance releases only
all	Major versions too

minor is the setting most sites want: security fixes arrive on their own, major versions stay a decision you make.

A core update snapshots the site first

Updating core through CorePanel automatically creates a restore point — files and database — before it starts. If the update breaks the site, rolling back is one click, not a support ticket.

Restore points

A restore point is a snapshot of one WordPress instance: a tarball of its document root plus a dump of its database.

• Created automatically before a core update, and manually whenever you want one (before a risky plugin update, before touching a theme).
• Three are kept per instance; the oldest is pruned when a new one exceeds the cap.
• Rollback restores both files and database to that moment.

Restore points are not backups

They are an operation-safety net with a three-deep history, stored on the same server. For real backups — full accounts, on a schedule, restorable after a deletion or a disk failure — use Account Backups.

Integrity check

Integrity verifies the site’s core files against wordpress.org’s published checksums and reports anything modified, added or missing. wp-content is deliberately out of scope: it is your content, and there is nothing to compare it against.

When core files have been tampered with, Reinstall core re-downloads the running version over the installation, replacing core files while keeping wp-content and wp-config.php untouched. That is the standard first step of a malware cleanup — after which you still need to look at plugins, themes and uploads.

Toggles

Three quick switches on the instance:

Toggle	What it does
Maintenance	Serves a 503 maintenance page from the web server, not from WordPress
Debug	Turns WordPress’s WP_DEBUG on or off
Indexing	Whether search engines are allowed to index the site (blog_public)

Maintenance mode being served by the web server is the point: it keeps working when WordPress itself is broken mid-upgrade, which is exactly when you need it.

A typical upgrade window:

corepanel wp maintenance 12 3 on
corepanel wp update 12 3 --core --all-plugins
corepanel wp maintenance 12 3 off

Indexing off is easy to forget

Turning indexing off on a staging site is right. Leaving it off when that site goes live is one of the most expensive small mistakes in hosting — check it at launch.

Changing the site URL

Set URL updates the site’s address, for a move to a new domain or from staging to production. Run it as part of a planned move, not on a live site you have not backed up.

Broken and missing instances

Status	Meaning	What to do
Broken	WordPress cannot be loaded — a fatal error, a bad wp-config.php, a database that will not answer	Check the database credentials and the error log; the integrity check and a restore-point rollback are the usual fixes
Missing	The document root is gone (moved, renamed or deleted)	Re-scan the account: if the site moved, it is re-adopted at its new path

Most operations are unavailable on a missing instance — there is nothing there to run WP-CLI against.