This plugin adds various small features to phpList which aren't worth implementing as individual plugins.
Each feature can be enabled separately through the plugin's group on the Settings page.

See the README file on the GitHub page https://github.com/bramley/phplist-plugin-addons for how to install the plugin.

When you have enabled the plugin there will be an Addons group on the Settings page where you can configure the plugin.

The plugin provides a page that updates the phplist code to the latest release. The main differences to the core phplist updater are

• it ignores unexpected files and directories in the top-level of the phplist installation directory (usually 'lists')
• it restores any additional plugins that have been installed
• it can restore specific phplist files that have been modified, such as a language file, or custom modifications

There are some important requirements:

• need to create a work directory that is writeable by the web server process. This should be outside the 'lists' directory and need not be within the web root at all, although it can be.
• the phplist installation directory (usually 'lists' but could have been renamed) must be writeable by the web server process
• the files in the phplist installation directory must be owned by the web server process, because they will be moved to the work directory

The plugin uses the work directory to download and expand the phplist distribution zip file, and stores a backup of the current phplist files and directories.

To enable the updater, add this to the end of config.php giving the file system path to the work directory

$addonsUpdater = [
    'work' => '/path/to/work/directory',
];

After upgrading the phplist code to the new release, the updater can then copy specific files from the backup. This can be useful if you have made changes to phplist files that you want to keep.

You should first verify that the new phplist release has not modified the files in question. If they have been modified then you will need to reapply manually the changes to the files in the new release.

To have the updater restore specific files, add a list of the files to the config.php variable. The path of each file should be relative to the “lists” directory.

For example to restore the English front-end translation file

$addonsUpdater = [
    'work' => '/path/to/work/directory',
    'files' => [
        'texts/english.inc',
    ],
];

There will then be a menu entry System > Alternative updater

The update process has three stages

• download the phplist zip file
• expand the zip file
• install the new phplist code

Only the third step changes anything, so if either of the first two steps has a problem then you can repeat the process or just stop and upgrade manually. Downloading the zip file can take a while depending on your web server, sometimes more than 20s. Expanding the zip file can also take even longer, sometimes more than 40s.

When the phplist code has been updated there is a link to upgrade the phplist database, that should be applied, then logout and login again.

At some point phplist will display a popup window regarding initialising phplist in your language, just let this complete normally.

Please raise any questions or problems in the user forum https://discuss.phplist.org/