[wp-hackers] Plugin Management and Autoupdate System

[Computer Guru]

There _is_ one thing that puts us at a big disadvantage: in order to
autoupdate, we'd have to assume that fopen and fwrite are available, at
least I don't know of any other way to replace the old version of the plugin
with a new one... and quite a few hosts block fopen and fwrite.

Even worse, we're going to have a real headache with n00bs coming in with
wrong permissions all over the place until some 'godsend' teaches them how
to do chmod 777 * -R and makes an even bigger mess of things.

Firefox can create and delete files on the fly, but this _is_ going to be
hard.

Does anyone have any ideas for how one would circumvent this? I don't think
the standard WP "If this file were writable you could save this.." dialog is
enough....

For now that's what I'm going to go for, it'll attempt fwrite, if it can
that's dandy, but if it can't we're going to have to spit the plugin file to
the screen for the user to cut and paste on their own - ugh.

Any suggestions? 

Computer Guru
NeoSmart Technologies
http://neosmart.net/blog/