Changelog for Premium plugins | Voters

Changelog for Premium plugins

complete

Akira Zabala

Currently WP Umbrella won't show the changelog for any pro plugin, but somehow the other platforms like ManageWP can show those changelogs. That being said, it would be really cool to be able to show those changelogs seamlesly (don't know the changelog source but it just works).

Find attached an example of how ManageWP is showing the Pro version changelog.

December 20, 2023

Aurelio Volle

You guys need to update the plugin to its latest version to enjoy this feature! :)

Poke @Gabriel

Brandon

Aurelio Volle I keep seeing this message when trying to view the pro changelogs. A couple were showing a loading or progress bar but never loaded anything. Still, glad there's progress being made on this!

Gabriel

Brandon I second that. After the first update for improved changelogs, Umbrella released a second update yesterday (27th june 2025) which should fix it (show changelog for plugins that don´t use the WP standard API), but the changelog is still not available for many plugins - and I mostly use popular and no exotic plugins.

Brandon

Gabriel Updated the WP Umbrella plugin to 2.18.4 yesterday, and today tried viewing the changelogs again... still a majority of the premium plugin changelogs don't load. Hopefully they'll keep working on improvements and this gets resolved.

Gabriel

Brandon I have the same issue and I don't think it will be fixed, because according to Umbrella it is a small probability that it doesn´t work. They pull the changelog via API and claim that for the plugins where the changelog is not visible, the providers have not followed the API implementation guidelines properly. They suggest we contact the providers to fix it, which I doubt they will or can do.

Brandon

Gabriel This is pretty disappointing. They're claiming their method works for 99% of premium plugins, but I tested 41 premium changelogs and it worked for 8. That's only 20% for my premium plugins.

They pushed out a new update and said to test again. I got through 13 of the changelogs and only one had been fixed. Threw in the towel at that point.

Gabriel

Brandon  Thanks for sharing your findings — I’ve been working closely with the Umbrella team on this issue over the past few weeks and can confirm that the changelog detection for premium plugins is more nuanced than it appears.
The core issue often lies in how premium plugins register themselves in WordPress. Umbrella relies on the plugin slug to resolve changelogs via the /wp-admin/plugin-install.php?tab=plugin-information&plugin=<slug>&section=changelog endpoint. If the plugin uses a non-standard or mismatched slug, the API fails to locate the changelog. This isn’t an Umbrella bug per se — it’s a limitation of how WordPress exposes plugin metadata.
In addition, some premium plugins actively block changelog access via plugins.php, or don’t register changelogs at all unless explicitly integrated. Umbrella has stated they won’t build custom integrations for each plugin, which is understandable given the scale (tens of thousands of plugins). They aim for compatibility with plugins that follow WordPress conventions — and unfortunately, many premium plugins don’t.
Caching layers (especially object cache) can also interfere with changelog retrieval. If the plugin metadata is cached incorrectly or not refreshed after updates, Umbrella may show outdated or missing changelogs.
I’ve flagged these issues with Umbrella and they’ve been responsive, but the current architecture does place the burden on users to report edge cases or contact plugin developers directly. I agree this isn’t ideal, especially for users managing dozens of premium plugins.
If you’re seeing consistent failures, I’d recommend:
•	Checking the actual slug used by the plugin (via get_plugins() or inspecting the plugin folder name).
•	Verifying whether the changelog is accessible via the plugin-install endpoint.
•	Clearing object cache and transient data to rule out caching issues.
Hopefully Umbrella will consider a fallback mechanism or allow user-defined slug overrides in future versions. Until then, reporting problematic plugins helps build a better compatibility map.
Thanks again for raising this — the more visibility this gets, the better.

Brandon

Gabriel Thanks for putting some effort into this. Have you heard from others about their experience with changelogs for premium plugins? You said "They aim for compatibility with plugins that follow WordPress conventions — and unfortunately, many premium plugins don’t."
This is the part I'm not getting... does it actually work for 99% of the premium plugins as WP Umbrella claims, or does the solution work in theory, but most premium plugins aren't setup "correctly"?
Are there just a few of use experiencing high failure rates (maybe due to our hosting, security, caching setups), and most WP Umbrella users can see all their premium plugin changelogs?

Gabriel

Brandon In my experience, the changelog doesn't work for 99% of plugins. This percentage is probably not evidence-based or not based on Umbrella user statistics - I guess. Unfortunately, I don’t see any feedback from other users. However, I can’t imagine that this issue doesn’t occur for others as well. I mostly use standard plugins with 100K to 1 million installations and exclusively popular premium plugins. Perhaps other users don’t use the changelogs at all or only rarely. For me, the consolidated display of changelogs before updates for each plugin in a monitoring tool is the most important feature—right after backups!

Aurelio Volle

marked this post as

complete

We've significantly improved the way we were fetching premium plugins.

Gabriel

Aurelio Volle Basically fine, that was very fast, but what has changed? My premium plugins still don´t show a changelog - at least tested a few minutes ago with plugins from crocoblock, no changelog available and that´s a worldwide very popular toolkit for WordPress, Elementor and Bricks!
Umbrella says: "We could not find the changelog of this plugin. It is possible that this is a premium plugin."
BUT: the changelog is available in WordPress backend and on a external website too!
For another plugin you link to an external website. So this means you still don´t pull the changelog from the WordPress backend plugin page, because there it is always available. After so long time waiting for that this is very disappointing...

Gabriel

I think the feature is still in development better to say there are still glitches, I will wait a few days...now it shows a "false"-error once I click on "Changelog".

Thomas Deneulin

Gabriel The changelog is fetched from your site and is not stored with us, so you'll need the latest version of the plugin (2.18.1 version)

Gabriel

Thomas Deneulin I just updated to 2.18.1 a few minutes ago! I opened a ticket and attached a screenshot. "False"-Error.

Aurelio Volle

marked this post as

in progress

We've started the active development of this feature and the release is expected next week.

Gabriel

Aurelio Volle Thank you very much, I've been waiting for this for a long time and I'm very happy.

Dusin Dauncey

Aurelio Volle - Is there any ETA on this one? A lot of us are wanting to see changelog references for premium plugins. I know I've sent emails to you before with a few examples, but I don't see those added yet for the manual portion until the longer-term solution is in-place. This is a fairly basic feature to have in a tool like this, so I'm really hoping this is added in the near future. Please and thank you. :-)

Gabriel

More than a year has passed since then...no progress, not yet integrated.

The lack of changelogs is appointing and time consuming. Instead of that, a lot of things in reports are planned or are in progress. I don´t use reports at all.

Dusin Dauncey

Plugins like FlyingPress and WS Form won't load currently in WP Umbrella. Hoping these get added for changelog support. :-)

Gabriel

Dusin Dauncey I've been waiting for a long time for the feature that Umbrella takes the changelog data from the WordPress backend like Manage WP does. This shouldn't be difficult and I don't understand why there are many other things in "Planned" status that are much less important for efficient maintenance management. It is very time-consuming when I have to go to the backend of every WordPress site to view the changelog for some plugins! How do other Umbrella users do it? Do they just update the plugins without knowing the changelog? That seems absolutely unrealistic to me.

Gabriel

Still no progress on this topic (and still not in the "planned" roadmap), although it is obiously not that difficult to implement, but annoys me every day before updating plugins, because I have to go in the WP backend or search in internet for the changelog. Unfortunately other not neccessary features have been priorised (e. g. domain expiry which isn´t available in some countries at all or SSL expiry, which is announced automatically by hosting providers etc. etc.). The most important thing before plugin updates is to read the changelog!

Gabriel

Unfortunately, nothing has happened on this topic for 8 months, especially since other less important things are on the planning or "in progress" list. The implementation of the changelog display is in my opinion easier than many things there.
And for me, one of the most time-consuming and cumbersome processes is having to search externally for the changelogs for countless plugins every time. 
Why not simply pull the content of the link from the provider's plugin update link in the WordPress admin area and place the text in Umbrella?

Gabriel

Hopefully the topic "changelog for all plugins" request makes it in the "planned" or "in progress" cue, because thats one of a few things, why I still have to log into ManageWP to check it and that´s very annoying;-) I find this task more important than some others on the list.

Gabriel

I know how ManageWP does it and I already forwarded it to the development team of Umbrella for further investigation and hopefully integration as soon as possible. It´s not atom physics, furthermore it looks relatively simple how ManageWP and others do it: They pull the changelog of all plugins directly from the URL out of the WP admin "dashboard>plugins" of each website account, which means it is the same content as you click on the link "view version X.X.X details" or "show details" in the backend plugins menu under the description of the plugin in the second column!

Akira Zabala

Gabriel Awesome! I was sure there should be an efficient and clever way to do it, thanks for contributing to this noble cause.

Gabriel

Akira Zabala Would be good if more users vote for it, because in my opinion this must be important for a lot of users? As user "Barnabas" said, many go to the ManageWP dashboard and check the changelog for those plugins, for which Umbrella does not provide changelogs. And I plan to avoid using ManageWP futurely, but at the moment it is not possible because some crucial features for an efficient workflow are missing in Umbrella (e. g. Safe Update, Changelog for Pro Plugins etc.). There are a lot of "would be nice"-features on the wishlist, but some "must have" should be implemented in order to switch to Umbrella completely.

Akira Zabala

Gabriel totally agree, same here using managewp for those little but important things. Wanting to ditch it for good.

Gabriel

Akira Zabala Yes, but as you see, it is still not planned and it takes up my time.

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