[wp-hackers] Plugin Management and Autoupdate System

[jason switzer]

On 7/30/06, Computer Guru <computerguru at neosmart.net> wrote:
>
> No, I'm talking about the in-built cron (the one giving us hell with
> future
> posting). If you look back at my message carefully, the reason is simple:
> no
> end-user timeouts.
>
> There _will_ be a user-clickable "check for updates" button, but the main
> system should be the wp cron, believe me, when you have a site with over
> 50
> plugins, you don't want to be on the waiting end.


Yeah, but if I have a site with 5 plugins, the cron script seems like such a
hassle. Checking for plugin updates shouldn't be a problem. Perhaps the
plugin versions could be maintained by WP itself (as a feed from
wordpress.org or something). Checking to see if there is a new version
should really be maintained by one machine, rather than having each
individual developer do this. This is how I see it working, regardless of
how many plugins you have:

Login as admin, go to the Plugins->Update page.
>From there, it queries the centralized wordpress feed that has the version
information (including stability versioning).
The user sees instantly that there is an update and can decide to take
action.
The user updates an arbitrary number of plugins.
The 'in-progress' bar shows up as it uses the meta-data to find the latest
zip/tarball, downloads it, and installs it.

Lets try and keep this as simple to use as possible. It is also very
important to keep tasks like this consistant. If I would update my plugins,
I would expect it to act similar to backing up my database.

Timeouts should not be a concern, timeouts happen with websites all the
time, that doesn't mean I want a cron job to visit the site for me while I
sleep.