[wp-hackers] Automatic Upgrades with InstantUpgrade plugin

[Doug Stewart]

On 4/4/07, Alex Günsche <ag.ml2007 at zirona.com> wrote:
> 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?

I'm a bit fuzzy on what exactly you'll be using the FTP for.  What
portion of the upgrade process are you proposing be accomplished via
FTP?  Downloading the .zip/tar.gz of WordPress from wp.org?

What advantages do you percieve in this method over your current
methodology (one which received a bit of a knock in the WP Podcast
#21, btw. http://tinyurl.com/3cgvd9   *grin*)
-- 
-Doug

http://literalbarrage.org/blog/