[wp-hackers] WP Plugin Update Detect

[Amit Gupta]

Well, I share Stephen's concern of browser timing out due to slow
response from any author's website, rendering plugins.php inaccessible.
I think that a better way would be a ping to a special script on
author's website. The script can be plugin-update.php as Ryan mentioned
& this script would accept pings, & return the latest version of the
plugin queried. The plugin.php file(or any other) on the user's end
would receive the response as XML, parse it & get the latest version &
compare it with the plugin file. If its a later version, then a link
will be displayed saying new version is available, which when clicked
will go to plugin URL returned in the ping's response. Since XMLRPC is
already a part of WP, it won't be much problem using it. The script can
be set to send 4-5 pings on each page load of plugins.php(in
alphabetical order, like they are displayed). The status of
pings(ok|bad) can be stored in a text file/db & those websites which
weren't pinged, will be pinged after a cycle is completed.

Now the script part on author's website. This script can be made
available on the WP website. Whenever the author makes a new version of
a plugin available on his website, he can update the plugin version in
this script. The thing to remember here is that there will be a problem
if the author changes the plugin's name. That problem can be overcome by
assigning a plugin-ID which can be used to identify the plugin in
conjunction with author's name. But that would mean deserting the
already distributed plugins & its true that many users don't check for
plugin updates in quite a long time, just like me. I check for plugin
updates no sooner than a week. ;) 

----
Amit




---------- Original Message from  steve at stevarino.com
<mailto:steve at stevarino.com>  ----------
Great idea, but two concerns: you don't specify a time-out time for 
update-checks and you don't include a method to disable individual 
plugin updates.

By a time-out period, I'm referring to this plugin only checking for 
updates every hour. By checking for updates every time plugins.php 
loads, an end-user could easily be seen as spamming  an authors site. 
Also think about page-load times...

And that brings me to my next point: disabling individual plugin 
updates... If a user has maybe 20 or more plugins there plugins.php 
will 
take forever to load. If a few of those plugin sites are bad or slow, 
the end-user's web browser has a danger of timing out (leaving 
plugins.php unreachable).

Again, while I think it's a great idea, there are some things to be 
worked out. Keep up the good work. :)

- Stephen

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