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Updates Not Showing

Canvas theme and Canvas Core plugin updates travel through the normal WordPress update pipeline, so they appear on the same Updates screen as everything else, with no separate updater to manage. When one is missing or refuses to install, the cause is almost always one of three things: a cached check, an inactive license, or a release that has not happened yet. Read this page top to bottom, because the checks are ordered by likelihood.

How Updates Arrive

WordPress asks Canvas's update service for the latest versions and shows anything newer on Dashboard > Updates and the Themes and Plugins screens. The site's license key travels with that check, and the service decides what the site is entitled to download, which is why the license state matters here. Results are cached for up to twelve hours, which is why a release you have read about can take a while to appear on its own.

Patch releases can install themselves: the Automatic Patch Updates setting in the General tab of Canvas > Theme Options is on by default and applies bug-fix releases automatically, while feature and major releases always wait for you. A site where patch updates seem to happen unprompted is therefore behaving as configured.

How To Force A Fresh Check

Starting screenDashboardUpdates.

Press Check again. That clears WordPress's update cache, and Canvas clears its own cached answer with it, so the next look at the screen reflects the service's current versions. If nothing appears after a forced check, the installed version is current, which you can confirm against the version number shown in the Canvas admin header.

The Update Shows But Will Not Install

An update row that appears without a working install action is the license surface, not a broken updater. When the service declines to hand a package to an unlicensed or expired site, the plugin's update row says it plainly: "Activate your Canvas license to enable one-click updates." Open Canvas > License, resolve the state using License Problems, then return to the Updates screen and check again.

Pitfalls

The changelog announces a version the site cannot see. The cached check lasts up to twelve hours. Force the check before suspecting anything else.

Updates stopped after the license expired. Expected: updates are paused in the expired state and resume on renewal. The site itself keeps rendering in the meantime.

A staging copy shows different update behaviour than production. Each installation checks with its own license state, so a staging site without an activation sees the update but cannot fetch the package.

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