[wp-hackers] Development Process

[Sam Angove]

On 7/28/06, Kimmo Suominen <kimmo+key+wordpress.c4f53f at suominen.com> wrote:
>
> Firefox has automatic plugin updates (and version checks), and it does
> not require a centralized server.  Each plugin provides the information
> necessary on where to check for updates.
>
> If WordPress had such an interface defined, I'd certainly support it
> for my plugins.

IAWTP. The closest there is to a standard right now is the plugin
metadata used by Matt Read's installer plugin and the Red Alt plugin
versioning service:

    Update Server: http://redalt.com/
    Min WP Version: 2.0
    Max WP Version: 2.0.1

No spec has been published for the server side. It uses XML-RPC,
though, and I'd personally prefer something like the plain-text
install manifests in Mozilla extensions. A plugin would have an
"Update URL" key in the metadata, leading to a plain-text file with
some data like this:

    Version: 1.0
    Min WP Version: 2.0
    Max WP Version: 2.1
    Update Description: See http://example.com/blog/2006/plugin-release
    Update Priority: normal
    Update File: http://example.com/files/plugin-1.0.zip

Since it's the same format used for plugin metadata, single file
plugins could put the URL of the plugin itself (hosted as
un-highlighted .phps or .php.txt, say) as the Update URL value.

But, whatever. This discussion went nowhere last time it came up, so I
don't see the point talking about it further unless a yay or nay comes
down from on high. Sad but true.