[wp-hackers] Simplicity in 2.next - plugin update checking

[Peter Westwood]

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I am not convinced that we can easily integrate firefox like automatic
plugin updating into the core.

If we this this is achievable then we should focus on implementing auto
updating of WordPress itself!

I am also not a big fan of adding supported version number headers to
plugins because it can be very annoying when a firefox plugin refuses to
run because of these checks. I suspect that some if not most plugin
authors would stick in a max version so high that the checks would be
negated.

However, i do think there are some great improvements we could make:

1/ Add an update url header to plugins.

e.g.: Update URI: rest://example.org/hello-world/
and/or Update URI: xmlrpc://example.org/hello-world/

These would be provided by the calling WordPress install with the plugin
version and WordPress version to allow for taylored update messages and

The rest endpoint would be called with the two version numbers as part
of the url e.g.
rest:/example.org/hello-world/%plugin-version%/%wordpress-version%/

The xmlrpc endpoint would be well defined with example server code
available on the codex.

2/ Add a new tab to the plugins section which allows the user to check
for updates - this would check for updates for all plugins with update
urls and display a list of update messages (HTML returned from the
update service and cached in the db) or a message to the effect of this
plugin has no update uri please check the authors site for updates
(linking to the Plugin URI from the plugin header)

This update page would only check for updates when the user requests it
_not_ on every visits.

We could and should limit the update checks to once per day to ensure
that we don't DOS the authors site.

We could provide via wp-plugins.org a hosted update endpoint service
that plugin authors can use to take the strain if they don't want to
host the plugin themselves.

We could make the update service handlers pluggable to allow plugin
authors to define there own update service handler (instead of the
builtin rest and xmlrpc handlers)

What do people think?

westi
- --
Peter Westwood
http://blog.ftwr.co.uk



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