[wp-hackers] Plugin Management and Autoupdate System

[Computer Guru]

> Are you planning on some sort of timeout function for reading these
> feeds?
> SMF uses something similar in their forum software and the problem is
> when you go to the admin front page, where the check is performed,
> sometimes there site is down and you end up waiting 2 or 3 minutes for
> that page to load. Considering there are people who don't renew
> domains/hosting packages or just give up all together, it would be nice
> to timeout the connection some how, or flag plugins that have feeds
> that are no longer there.

I'm still at version 0.1 and nowhere near done even thinking it through -
thanks for bringing this up though, esp. with what we've seen from ping-wait
issues, it's not going to be pretty.

The plan is to have a 3 second timeout after DNS resolve. Generally
speaking, this should be good since most servers are hosted at companies
with OC-48+ connections. I'm thinking of adding an option for the timeout,
but all that comes later.

More importantly, this isn't going to happen on visiting the admin center,
and won't happen for all plugins at once. It'll simply be "check this plugin
once a week" kind of thing, and use the wp-cron for the checking - so you'll
just visit the plugin page and "OMG, SK2 has a new version! Cool, let's OK
the update..."

I'm thinking in terms of a 3-strikes-you're-out failure checks. Basically,
if a plugin doesn't read up 3 times in a row, it'll be flagged. It is then
up to the user to decide whether or not the plugin should be checked in the
future.

Just a thought... 

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