Changes/additions for support article "Must Use Plugins"

[abitofmind]

📄 ​https://wordpress.org/support/article/must-use-plugins/

• 👍 Overall well written.
• ❌ But some aspects are not yet covered (out of my own experience):

1. Integrate proper keywords into that official support article so that "Must Use Plugins" becomes more prominent in search engine results as an intended/supported method to "disable updates and update notifications for a particular plugin". Phrases/Keywords to include:

• How do I keep a plugin frozen at a certain version?
• How do I disable auto-updates?
• How do I disable update notifications?
• The "update available" badge over the plugins menu entry does not go away for plugins with auto-updates disabled?
• How do I remove that badge counter? (for the single affected plugin)?

2. Improve this: Moving a plugin folder there is not enough. You need a PHP file pointing at it.

The documentation indeed mentions:

WordPress only looks for PHP files right inside the mu-plugins directory, and (unlike for normal plugins) not for files in subdirectories. You may want to create a proxy PHP loader file inside the mu-plugins directory: <code snippet>

• Even though I'm somehow tech-savvy, the term proxy PHP loader file scared me off as too technical.
  • Proposed alternative terms: stub file, auxillary file, inclusion file.
• And as the code snippet was quite empty and inconcrete, it did not convey the idea to me either.
  • For these both reasons I overread that section.
• Please include a more concrete/vivid code snippet, that better conveys the idea,
  • such as the code snippet, that I received in this support session that had started as my feature proposal which staff and me rejected for good reasons after having discussed in detail.
  • In the code snippet use a real world description field like "I keep that plugin frozen in v1.2.3 because I need feature X which was removed in v2+. And then was abruptly abandoned. But I really need the plugin to work as it does in v1.2.3.". Then the reader immediately gets the idea!

3. Please also add: How to correctly migrate an enabled plugin to a must use plugin

• I found out by trial and error.
• Users may appreciate if the support article could cover that use case as well.