[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #14179: Theme asking to update (theme with same name on WordPress.org)

[WordPress Trac]

#14179: Theme asking to update (theme with same name on WordPress.org)
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 Reporter:  design_dolphin  |       Owner:
     Type:  defect (bug)    |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal          |   Milestone:  WordPress.org
Component:  Themes          |     Version:
 Severity:  normal          |  Resolution:
 Keywords:                  |     Focuses:
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Comment (by dingdang):

 @grapplerulrich

 Replying to [comment:42 grapplerulrich]:
 > The main issue is with the author name. The author name is the style.css
 can anything and the theme author could change this text whenever they
 wish. WordPress.org knows who the theme belongs to from the uploader
 process and not from the `style.css`.

 The proposed method does just one thing: '''creates a new single table'''.
 That means it is not incompatible with any other parts of the code, even
 like in your example that wordpress.org knows the author by other means.

 To understand better how it works, here is actually how I came up with
 that simple idea - I sniffed back to WP 3.0 its API requests and found
 what is common for all of the versions - all of them are sending back to
 the API these 3 values (slug, author, author URI). Then we know there are
 N themes and M total versions at the SVN that I call "native". All we have
 to do is to identify them by a unique string, put that in a table and
 that's all. From that point forward the API will know if a request coming
 for update check is about a "native" theme or an external one (and so used
 for the counting of active themes as well).

 To clarify more - the MD5 is there not because it is needed, just for
 esthetics. Now after I did more tests (I've downloaded partially 36000
 different versions of themes, 3100 unique themes) I can come up with
 VERSION 2 of the method which is even simpler.

 '''Key factors:'''

 - '''MD5 processing is not needed''' (so not at all increasing of CPU time
 for API)
 - '''author URI is not needed''' to be taken in consideration (and so
 lower the chance for a client to lose future updates if he accidentally
 changes author's URI line in style.css file after installation) - just the
 additional author string is enough for this to work.

 '''VERSION 2 UPDATE'''

 1. No need of changes in the core even for optimization as there is no MD5
 anymore
 2. UIDs are composed simpler by just concatenating the
 slug+delimiter+author strings
 3. No need to attach the second time the slug - it is already in the
 concatenated string
 3. The invention of the method is the table of UIDs and it is the same -
 just a simple list of UIDs
 4. Identification of the theme slug is the same (extracting from UID the
 string that precedes the delimiter)
 5. New uploads to the SVN result in addition (if not present) of a new
 entry to the table as in version 1

 '''Additional benefits of version 2:'''
 - no need for MD5 calculations
 - less fields used for identification, the list of UIDs is almost the same
 in numbers as the count of the unique themes (as the author field is
 almost never changed, the approximate coefficient is 1.17 which means the
 table of UIDs will have approx. 5700 entries for 4900 themes, an excess of
 just 800)

 Cheers

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/14179#comment:43>
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