Updates to Slack is a plugin that replaces email notifications to announce available updates to your WordPress installation. It covers the following alerts whenever your WordPress site has updates available for;

• Core WordPress Updates
• Plugin Updates
• Theme Updates

Alerts can be sent to one or more Slack channels and alerts can be scheduled daily, weekly or monthly at a time of your choosing.

Updates to Slack Settings

Once installed, the settings can be found in your WordPress admin via Settings, Updates to Slack.

All settings are on a single page and provide you with the following fields.

General Settings

• Slack URLs
  • Add one or more (one per line) Slack Webhook URLs
  • Setting up a Slack Webhook is very a very simple task, made easier if you open the Settings & Administration section from within your Slack client
  • You can usually get a URL from your Slack account by going to Settings & Administration -> Manage Apps -> Custom Integrations and creating an Incoming Webhook
• Slack Alerts Enabled
  • If disabled, alerts are not despatched
  • An easy way to turn functionality on / off
• Site Name
  • This defaults to the site name within your WordPress settings, but you also have an option to add a different name in here if you have several WordPress sites and need to better differentiate them

Scheduling

• Next Scheduled Run Time
  • You choose the next date and time for when the alert will be triggered
• Frequency
  • The alert will then be triggered at the frequency selected, following the next scheduled run time
  • For example, selecting the next run time as tomorrow at 3pm and the frequency as daily will see you receive the first alert at 3pm tomorrow and then 3pm the following day, and the days that follow that
  • Please note alerts are only despatched to Slack URLs if there is an update to bring to your attention

Reporting

• Last Run
  • This is a time and datestamp of the last time updates were checked
  • Useful to ensure that the plugin is running
• Last Run Response
  • This is the response from Slack for each URL alerted
  • Again, this is useful to ensure that the plugin is running as intended
• Trigger Slack Alert Now
  • This triggers an immediate message to all Slack URLs
  • This will send the current state of core, plugin and theme updates where updates are available
  • If no updates are available then a test message is sent instead
  • This can only be used once at least one Slack URL has been saved in the plugin’s settings, and “Slack Alerts Enabled” is set to “Yes”

Ignoring Plugins and Themes

The Updates to Slack plugin boasts the ability to ignore update notifications for selected Plugins and Themes, from the list of those installed on the site.

Should you have plugins or themes that, when an update is available and applied, would deprecate required functionality or visuals on your site, and / or updating it isn’t an option, then you may not want to be alerted to it on every scheduled update that is sent to your Slack channel(s). Similarly, with themes, you may be keeping a native WordPress theme, such as twenty twenty-one for troubleshooting but you don’t actually need to immediately address any available updates for it.

In this case you can prevent the plugin from informing you of selected plugin and theme updates.

Leaving out of date plugins and themes on a live and public website is not advised, and this functionality is not intended to allow negligence in the upkeep of a site’s assets. For this reason, it is not possible to ignore core WordPress updates when they are made available.

This functionality is intended only to cut down on the amount of unnecessary information being received, in order to assist in a well-maintained WordPress environment.

Slack Alerts

When updates are available, and either the schedule is triggered or the Test button in the admin is clicked, the plugin utilises Slack’s Block Kit to structure the alerts.

This keeps a clean and simple messaging system, to keep you informed of any new updates.