[wp-hackers] Automatic Upgrades with InstantUpgrade plugin

[Alex Günsche]

Hi guys,

I need some feedback on an idea I have. As it is somewhat complex to
implement, I'd like to hear some opinions first.

I maintain the InstantUpgrade plugin[1], which performs WP upgrades at
the push of a button. Now this plugin needs to write lots of files, so
permissions must be changed -- which (a) is a bit hard to enable for
some users, (b) is a bit dangerous (cf. [2]) and (c) is hard to get rid
of. But there is a large interest in this (or such a) solution, and I
saw that even Mr. Matt M. himself ;) hinted that he would love to see
something like that in the WP core -- given the permissions issue can be
resolved[3].

Now I actually have an idea how those issues could be overcome, but this
is quite "adventuresome": I want to open an FTP session with the user's
credentials and let the plugin do the upgrading via FTP. I think this
would pretty much eliminate all file permission issues.

My questions are:

1. From your experience, do you think one could create such an FTP-based
solution which would work smooth for 95 percent of all users? What would
need to be done to allow this across server environments?

2. Do you know a decent lib for FTPing in PHP? It should not use the FTP
extension, but rather fsockopen etc., and it should be able to do the
following: mature transfering mechanisms (including some error
handling), support 'LIST -l' (I need the attributes), and maybe some
recursive functionality for reading and putting files/directories would
be nice. I have already searched at phpclasses.org and found 2 nice
libs, but their licenses don't fit (though I'm negotiating with the
authors). However, maybe there are other good solutions out there.

t.b.c. ;-)

What do you think?


[1] http://www.zirona.com/software/wordpress-instant-upgrade
[2] http://www.zirona.com/blog/software/a-few-words-about-the-instantupgrade-plugin
[3] http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/upgrading-wordpress/#comment-100841


Best regards,
Alex

-- 
Alex Günsche, Zirona OpenSource-Consulting
http://www.zirona.com/ | Hilfe für das HQ AC: http://www.prohq.de
PubKey for this address: http://www.zirona.com/misc/ag.ml2007.asc