From 2.7 version onwards WordPress supports automatic upgrade of plugins. Usually this is a good thing. WordPress will inform you of any updates to the plugin and you just need to click on “upgrade automatically” to keep your plugin upto date.
But recently I realized that auto upgrade is not always good. I have been using the SyntaxHighlighter plugin from Erik on my blog and one day it showed that a new upgrade is available. I went ahead and updated the plugin and realized that it no longer worked. The problem was that the new version of SyntaxHighlighter named “SyntaxHighlighter Evolved” was a different version created by someone named Viper007Bond. But since he had the URL http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/syntaxhighlighter/, the plugin system of WordPress was identifying it as an upgrade of Erik’s plugin!
So I had two options left. Either update all my posts with the new plugin’s conventions or rollback to the old version by Erik. I prefered the second method(changing posts was too much work).
So if you are a plugin writer, ensure that you have the official WordPress extend entry for your plugin also. Otherwise people can hijack your plugin using auto-upgrade feature!
