So much has been said already, but I too echo the sentiments of the rightly annoyed cPanel license holders in this thread.
It was a totally unacceptable decision to unwittingly install WordPress Toolkit without consent of the server operators.
@Forrest Ward - your server did not get any Wordpress installations as part of the update. If your server had Wordpress Manager, which has been a cPanel tool for some time, or if you clicked the option to install Wordpress Toolkit during the Feature Showcase, your machine would get Wordpress Toolkit installed. It just gives you the option to install and manage all Wordpress installations more easily.
As mentioned earlier in this thread, you can remove the RPM if you don't want the tool on the machine at all.
Wrong. I manage 9 WHM servers, and did not get asked about this during automatic updates. Most of which are in the "stable" branch until the next LTS is available, though this problem contradicts the meaning of stability. Having not known these plug-ins exist let alone what they are and do I've never opted in to WordPress Manager or WordPress Toolkit.
WordPress Manager and WordPress Toolkit are not comparable. The latter suddenly imposes separate licensing restrictions without any prior notice or consent, and blocks clients from routine business.
That is why this is a big problem. What exactly gives cPanel the right to modify client WordPress installations without their consent?
Nothing. Don't modify our production web applications please.
Removing this from our 9 WHM servers (including the hundreds of sites we host) along with dealing with queries about why some unknown software licensing constraint is suddenly in place, is costing us time thus money.
Are cPanel going to compensate license holders for commercial time that has been lost correcting this problem?
Also let's look at your own documentation:
https://docs.cpanel.net/knowledge-base/cpanel-developed-plugins/wordpress-toolkit/
- "WordPress Toolkit Lite installs by default"
- "When you upgrade a server to cPanel & WHM version 92, the nightly cPanel & WHM update process detects whether WordPress Manager is installed on the server. If WordPress Manager is installed, the update process will install WordPress Toolkit."
I may appear to be unjustifiably annoyed with this (shambolic) decision but given the time lost and customer applications modified without consent it has to be 100% understood by the cPanel team that this is not an acceptable practice. Someone screwed up bad, and this has damaged our perspective of cPanel's direction along with their reputation.
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I've run the RPM command to remove this plug-in from infected servers (and yes, this shady installation is an infection), however it only removes the plug-in itself. It does not undo the changes it made to client web applications without our consent.
Is there a script from cPanel we can use to clean up their infection from client web applications, or must we go through each WordPress site manually?