WordPress Must Use (MU) Plugins
While researching Custom Post Types I found a little-known technique to ensure plugins are installed and run regardless of user interaction.
The idea is that the Must Use Plugins will be active by default and administrators will not be able to remove them from the admin Plugins GUI, making the must-use directory the perfect place to put code that must run to make the installation work, possibly like CPT and other customization plugins that we want/need to run independently of the theme we use.
Must-use plugins are not perfect. For all the advantages that they offer, they also have several and disadvantages that may render them less useful than you first thought
- Advantages
- MU Plugins are always-on
- No need to enable via admin
- Administrators and users cannot disable them other than by deleting the plugin from the directory manually
- Can be enabled by uploading the file to the mu-plugins directory, No login necessary
- PHP loads Must-Use plugins in alphabetical order before normal plugins, meaning API hooks added in a mu-plugin apply to all other plugins
- Disadvantages and Caveats
- Plugins in the must-use directory will not appear in the update notifications nor show their update status on the plugins page
- You are responsible for learning about and performing updates to these plugins
- WordPress only looks for PHP files right inside the mu-plugins directory, and not for files in subdirectories
- You may want to create a proxy PHP loader file inside the mu-plugins directory that loads all the plugins your must-use plugins
- Activation hooks are not executed in plugins added to the must-use plugins folder
- These hooks are used by many plugins to run installation code that sets up the plugin initially and/or uninstallation code that cleans up when the plugin is deleted
- Plugins depending on these hooks may not function in the mu-plugins folder
- You should test all plugins specifically in the mu-plugins directory before being deployed to a live site