WordPress and its plugins require updates pretty frequently and since I maintain several sites doing this update has become a bit tedious by hand. I really don’t like having FTP access into my web sites unless absolutely necessary which seems to be the only way to do things within the application itself.
To combat this, I wrote a simple script that when passed a path to a wordpress install will update wordpress to the latest version and all currently installed plugins (activated or not). This will forcibly upgrade things even if they are already up to date, so be careful with any customizations you may have made to plugins. It does not currently update themes for this reason.