06.26
Disclaimer: This is not about hiding or disabling Wordpress’s automatic update notices. If that’s your goal, there are a series of wonderful plugins which will do the job for you (for core, plugin, and theme updates). Instead, this is about making it physically impossible for administrators of a Wordpress installation to use the install/update functionality in the backend of the site.
If you choose to do this, you must make sure to keep up-to-date with new releases and update your site as soon as new versions are released. If you fail to do so, you run an increased risk of security vulnerabilities or performance issues with your website/blog.
Short version
If you create a file named upgrade in the wp-content directory, Wordpress will be unable to download any new plugins/themes or upgrade existing code.
Long version
I needed to figure out how to disable the automatic update feature because I was using SVN to store/deploy the code for several clients’ Wordpress installations. I had a central SVN repository for each client which I pushed changes to and which the websites pulled their code from. Unfortunately, Wordpress deletes all traces of the existing plugin when upgrading; that means the .svn directory inside each plugin’s directory would also be removed, breaking the working copy. If I didn’t disable the feature, someone with administrative access could break the website’s working copy just by upgrading a plugin.
As it so happened, I found an easy solution. All I had to do was create a 0 byte file at wp-content/upgrade (removing the directory with that name if it exists). That directory is used by Wordpress as temporary space when installing/updating code. Placing a file there instead causes the process to fail; Wordpress has no place to store files temporarily. It is sort of a hack, but it works well enough for my purposes; I don’t have to modify the Wordpress core, I just have to create a single file.