A very useful,but not very well advertised function of WordPress has been added with version 2.9.x. I thought a quick blog post to show people how to use it was in order.
As of 2.9.x you can now to a mass update of all your out of date plugins.
Tell Me Where it Is
It would seem logical to place the mass update under the plugins section of the dashboard, perhaps under the plugins requiring update section, but no, that would be too obvious.
This very useful function has been positioned on the same page where you perform an update of your core wordpress files.
http://{YOUBLOG}/wp-admin/update-core.php
What Does It Look Like
Here is a screen dump of the page from my blog:
How Does It Work?
Click on select all, or manually choose all plugins to update and then click on upgrade plugins and it does the whole shooting match in on fell swoop. Excellent, if you have a lot of plugins to update this eases the maintenance burden.
Backup
It’s probably a good idea to backup your system before you click update.
Wrap Up
There have been plugins to do this for quite some time, I am glad to see this added to the core functionality but why conceal it in such a weird location.