Make plugin uninstalable on older versions of WordPress

4 Views

So, if a plugin should not ever be installed on an older version of WordPress, whats the best way to go about it? What I normally do is something like this: 

if ( ! function_exists( 'get_post_format' ) ) {
    $error_handler = set_error_handler( 'my_plugin_die' );
    trigger_error( '', E_USER_ERROR );
}

function my_plugin_die( $errno, $errstr, $errfile, $errline ) {
    global $wp_version;
    exit( 'This plugin requires WordPress version 3.0 or greater. You are currently using version ' . $wp_version . '. Please <a target="_top" href="' . esc_url( admin_url( 'update-core.php' ) ) . '">upgrade to the latest version of WordPress</a> before installing this plugin.' );
}

I place this straight in the plugin file – outside of any class. It seems to work well in all of my testing, but seems rather harsh. Is there any chance of a plugin having this code will ever be activated?

Read More

How to you deal with situations like this? There seems to be absolutely no documentation on this kind of thing.

Post Views: 4

Related posts

Leave a Reply

1 comment

  1. I think you’re taking the right approach: version-checking and die. The only thing I might recommend would be to hook it into the Plugin activation hook.

    Out of curiosity, though: why aren’t you using wp_die() (Codex ref)?

    As a side note: I would love to see the Theme and Plugin repositories implement some sort of UI similar to AMO, that indicates whether a given Theme/Plugin is compatible with the user’s current WordPress version. Plugins have a Requires: WordPress-version header tag that would work sufficiently for this functionality, and I would think that Themes could implement the same, just as easily.

    p.s. I would strongly recommend against using the “Compatibility rating”; that functionality is beyond broken.