[wp-hackers] Development Process

[Doug Stewart]

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Sam Angove wrote:
> 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.

Here's an idea:
Why not leverage WordPress?  Create categories that roughly correspond
to high level functions (multimedia, podcasting, etc.), then
subcategories per-plugin, and then have a plugin on the blog level that
checks feeds - for instance, have a http://pluginupdatr.wordpress.com
with a /feed/podcasting/ and a /feed/podcasting/podpress/subfeed.
Plugin authors could become "contributors" and could add/update metadata
to their plugins' categories.  This would have a secondary net benefit
of allowing for an XML-enabled changelog, of sorts; one could simply hit
the feed to see the last 10 or so revs, their release dates, etc.

Actually, I'm liking this idea even more, the more I think about it,
including the fact that it could be a wordpress.com blog that served as
the infrastructure behind the beast.

Thoughts?


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Doug Stewart
Senior Systems Administrator/Web Applications Developer
Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Labs
dstewart at atl.lmco.com
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