What the upgrade button is, and when you will see it
The Gang Sheet plugin updates itself from inside WordPress. It is not listed on WordPress.org, so it never appears under Dashboard → Updates and WordPress will never offer you an update notice for it.
The Download & Upgrade Now button only appears when your installed version is behind the current release. If your plugin is up to date, there is no upgrade button on the Home tab and nothing for you to do.
When your version is behind, the right-hand side of the Home tab shows this notice in red:
There is a new version of plugin, please upgrade. You have to upgrade plugin to continue. Latest Version: (the current release number)
Steps
- In the WordPress admin sidebar, click Gang Sheet. You need the
manage_optionscapability to see this menu, so shop managers and editors will not have it. - Stay on the Home tab. Look at the right-hand column for the red "There is a new version of plugin, please upgrade." notice.
- Click Download & Upgrade Now.
- If the upgrade succeeds, the page reloads by itself about three seconds later. Check the Current Version readout in the tab bar to confirm the new number.
- If the upgrade does not succeed, your browser immediately starts downloading
gang-sheet-builder_latest.zipinstead. That is the fallback. Install that file by hand — see the manual upgrade article for the exact steps.
Why your Products, Orders and Payments tabs vanished
When the installed version is behind the current release, the plugin hides three of its six tabs. You are left with Home, Images and Support only. Products, Orders and Payments come back on their own once the upgrade completes and the page reloads.
This is deliberate, not a fault. Those three tabs talk to the Drip Apps server using request formats that change between releases, so an out-of-date plugin is not allowed to use them.
Do not deactivate the plugin to "reset" it before upgrading. Deactivating deletes your stored access token, shop UUID and shop slug, and tells Drip Apps to delete the shop record. Upgrade in place instead.
What the upgrade actually does
The plugin downloads the release zip from Drip Apps, checks that the file really is a zip, compares it against the published SHA-256 checksum, inspects every path inside the archive to be sure nothing would be written outside the plugin folder, and only then unzips it over your existing installation.
The unzip step only creates and overwrites files. It never deletes files that are no longer in the release, so an old file from a previous version can survive an upgrade. This is normal and harmless.
Why Keep the Plugin Updated?
- The Products, Orders and Payments tabs are disabled until you do.
- Cart line signing, variation reuse and the newer product types only work on recent versions.
- Fixes and new product settings reach your store through the plugin, not through WordPress updates.