[wp-testers] Suggestion for a future release, maybe?

[Foolish Visions]

Hey all,

I'm new to doing this, so please bear with me. :)

I'm one of those people who can mess with PHP enough to be scary.  I can make things work, but they probably don't work in the *best* manner possible.  That's why I generally have a lot of ideas for WordPress, but am pretty terrified of contributing (except some advice on the forums, occasionally), because I'm afraid if I submit something, I'll bring the whole system crashing down.  It'll be the WordPress Apocalypse or something, and the survivors will come to eat my brain.

But this, I felt was worthy enough to at least run by you all.

So I belong to another list of web developers - not a lot of them really know WordPress, but they are finally getting into it.  One of them posed a question this morning, and it's actually a common problem I've seen.  It's not WordPress' *fault*, but what I suggested to her might allow WordPress to *help* - I think it's an idea for consideration, anyway.  

Her issue was that her host had some server fixin' going on, and broke the connection to the database.  It's intermittently connecting, so the site is doing this "Here's my pretty WP site!" to "OMG! I'm down in flames!" dance every few minutes.  So she was wondering if there was a way to simply check if the connection was fine - if so, move on to WordPress, and if not, redirect to a "safety" folder in the site that would display some HTML (so the site wouldn't suffer from all kinds of headache-inducing activity).

I suggested adding the following to her WordPress index.php file (the WP site is at the root), just after the call to require the wp-blog-header.php file:

// grab the login info from the wp-config.php file and check connection
$link = mysql_connect(DB_HOST, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD);
	  if (!$link) {
	  	// if no connection,  redirect to HTML backup folder
    		header('Location: http://www.whateversite.com/backup/);
	  } 
	  mysql_close($link);

Anyway, a couple of people chimed up and said it might be worth letting *you* all know about this to see if it was worthy of making it part of core someday.  Or some kind of optional thing if people want to have it.  I dunno.

Like I said, I'm not an expert on the core end of WordPress, and servers not connecting to the DB aren't really WordPress' fault, (and there's probably better ways of accomplishing this) but it seems like it would be a really useful thing to offer.  You all can take it or leave it.  (Just be gentle - it's my first time!) :)

~Shelly