New Plugin Hides WordPress 5 Upgrade Nags

We’re a few weeks into the world of WordPress 5 and Gutenberg, and the hysteria has quieted down a bit. Maybe it was the holidays, but now that the new year is here and folks are back to work and school, I’ve seen an uptick in reports of sites breaking when they are updated to WP 5.

Specifically, I’ve had a few client sites where the customer has updated WordPress to version 5 without telling me and lo and behold, their sites decided to break.

I’m sure many agencies haven’t had enough time to go through all their client sites to ensure everything is going to be OK, but every time my clients log into their site, they are seeing that “Update to WordPress 5” nag alert bar, and so they do it.

I don’t want them to. Not yet. So I asked on Twitter if there was a way to disable that notification, specifically.

Jay Hill jumped into the replies and developed a nice, small plugin that will hide that WordPress 5.0 upgrade nag.

You can find the plugin at Github. Thanks, Jay! This is a nice, quick thing to add to sites until we’re ready to update them. If you don’t want to add the plugin, you can probably just add the couple of lines to your functions.php file.

We should probably have a talk eventually about plugins and themes abusing the notification and alert system, but that’s a conversation for another time.