What actually is “suspend site” doing?
I like to have pretty much every website I develop in MainWP - however, only 20% are actually paid maintenance. This means, I want to see all websites in my dashboard but don’t include all in the update overview.
I see there are also “Ignore core updates”, “Ignore plugin updates”, “Ignore theme updates” and probably that’s the settings I am looking at.
But what is “suspend site” useful for if it is not actually suspending the site?
When a site is suspended, updates on it cannot be performed via MainWP. That includes automatic and manual updates.
Naturally, you can still perform updates directly on the WP Admin of the child site.
Additionally, the suspended site cannot be selected in the sidebar on any page of the MainWP Dashboard.
Thanks for explaining. When you think of it from a new user’s point of view, some things are odd though.
e.g. go to the Dashboard of the suspended site. It looks like updates can be performed just normally. I can even run the update here and it looks like it is running the update. There is no information at all. It looks like you run the update, and only when it is finished, you see that nothing actually has changed.
Go to the global Plugin Updates page, and it’ll also look like updates can be performed normally.
It’s true, that those updates are actually not run. But it only tells you after you try to run the updates. Therefore those sites will also always show there with available updates, because the updates are never run.
I am really not sure if I am missing something, but can you see how confusing that all is?
As I didn’t find any other post about this, I thought it must be me who is not understanding some things. But when you test it, you’ll see that some things don’t add up here.
Thanks for providing detailed feedback.
We agree that it can be somewhat confusing, particularly the failed updates that are triggered from the Dashboard of the suspended site.
We will be making changes to this in the next version of the MainWP Dashboard by either disabling certain updates buttons and/or providing tooltips explaining that updates cannot be triggered because the site is disabled.
Thanks a lot - you also have those features “ignore plugin/core/theme updates”. When I tick those boxes the updates won’t show in the Update dashboard. Actually, somehow I expected this from the feature suspend site. But I am not long enough a MainWP user to know how it developed over time, so that 2 similar features are there right now, that work quite differently.
I personally think, this should be thought through from a user experience and user expectations first, and then implementation be done accordingly, to avoid disimprovment in the end. Good luck, and let me know if you need some feedback
Thanks!
I want to quickly add, e.g. suspend site does not work as expected, so I use “ignore plugin/core/theme updated” instead quite often.
However, I cannot filter/find those sites.
I want to check, which sites are currently set to “ignore plugin/core/theme updates”. I think I would need to manually check each site. There is a filter for “suspended” sites, but it is just a different feature than expected.
I know that just adds an additional layer of complexity - but you see that I come from a user point of view, so I think those arguments can’t be that wrong.
best wishes
Markus
Unfortunately, we don’t currently have a filter in the Manage Sites table for that.
Currently, if a site is set to “ignore plugin/core/theme updates”, the respective columns will show 0 in the manage sites table, so that may be of some help.
Please feel free to make a suggestion about this on our feedback site. That way, others can vote for it, letting us know which features our users want the most.
A filter about that is not that critical if “suspend” would work as you expect it to work I think. As I said, I don’t know the history of the development of those features.
I think a workaround is to always do the following:
whenever you want to disable a site from the updates dashboards (e.g. non-paying client or client who only pays for licenses but not maintenance) select suspend AND also “ignore plugin/core/theme”. This way the site is added to MainWP which allows me to use some other features e.g. search all sites where plugin X is installed. But at the same time, it is not listed to the dashboards with available updates (even though there are updates available, I don’t want to see them because the site is suspended + ignore plugin/core/theme is ticked
I added the feedback. I hope you can do something about it.
best regards
Markus
Thanks for creating a suggestion on our feedback site.
As previously mentioned, for the next release of the MainWP Dashboard, we plan on adding informative tooltips and deactivating the Update button for suspended sites on their Child Dashboard.
The possibility of further changes to the Suspend feature will be assessed in the future, and the community feedback on your suggestion will be taken into account.
Thanks, excited to see the next version - thanks for listening to us
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