I seriously wonder why they didn't write an installer+updater file in the Flarum codebase which updates automatically if 10 days pass after the admin logged with a new update available, or 30 days pass without the admin being active.
I mean, at most they would need to add a script which saves in the DB those things as well as successfully checking the latest version of Flarum from their site once every month or more (if nobody visited the site for more than a month).
Let me detail, like A LOT !!!
If someone visits the installed site, it checks if more than 30 days have passed since the last time it checked the version, and if it's true it connects with a flarum.org page which shows the latest version, the date the latest version was published at, and the link for the latest installer/updater, updates the last-checked-date, and then proceeds to check if it needs to update. If it needs, then it proceeds to check if it needs to force-update.
To force-update, it checks if the last time an admin was active was more than 30 days before the current date, in which case it updates. Else/otherwise, it checks if more than 10 days passed since the moment the admin was notified of there being an update pending (by showing a big weighty/phat, highlighted UPDATE button on every page). if not, there is no need to force-update.
Force-updating should be done by having the installation access a link which queues it for a flarum.org site to load a force-update script (on the installation side) which would download the archive needed for updating, then would proceed to copy the current installation file in a temp folder, unarchive the latest version in another temp folder, backup the database in a backups-only folder (details about that in the next paragraph) which is not in the first temp folder, turn the whole site offline (for safety), run the bundled update scripts needed to update the live database from the current version to the next version, backing up after every update, then proceed through the force-update scripts until either (a) there's a sql error or a validity-check error for that version, in which case the error should be returned on the force-update page of the installation, the temp folders should be deleted, the database returned to the last live version (which should be marked separately in the database backups folder), updates the last-checked-date with the current version and returns the site to a live state.
To safely back up the database, it would need to generate a php version which, when run, would take the database credentials and overwrite the existing database (if there is any).
A somewhat similar process should exist for normal updates, but the admin should be redirected to another page which calls that force-update page on the installation side, instead of having the flarum servers keep that page loaded. Though it could also be a different script, which uses ajax to basically do the same things, but show the progress to the admin, so the admin knows that "3 partial updates happened, and the 4th crashed, so the site is reverted to the current version" (or kept to the 4th version, if the files for that update can still be found on the flarum website, to be downloaded)., and there should also be a script the admin can manually run to revert to the last live version before the current version, with the files for the downgrade kept in an archive next to the database backup, but only one such archive existing and linking to the database file it is meant for.
Since those error codes are sent to the Flarum team, the updater for that version can be tweaked in the next release, so the update can hopefully be performed.
To reduce the resources load on the flarum installations, the check should also be done every time an admin visits the main administration page, as well as every time the index (main page) of the installation is loaded. To protect sensitive sites, the installation should be checked for the presence of a forced-update settings which is by default set to true, and cannot be changed without manually accessing the database (or thorugh another script bundled in the package).
Also, would be nice if Flarum added some the details-summary html tags in it's editor and interpretor.
Edit: If you know someone from the team who might want to read this, you might want to mention them here. I'm here once every few months, so I don't know who I should and who I should not mention.
