[wp-hackers] Proposal: Unified installer frontend

[Anirudh Sanjeev]

Hi,

I'm the author of the OneClick plugin, which allows uploading of themes and
plugins via the zip file or a firefox extension. I've gotten a lot of
positive feedback and many requests to get this merged with the core
wordpress source. I was planning to propose this for Google Summer of code,
but I have been selected as an Intern at Google's India office,
automatically disqualifying me from the program.

But what I've been working on is this:
1. Creating a single frontend and a seperate menu to handle installation and
removal of extensions to wordpress.
2. An uploaded zip file will be unzipped, checked and verified, to prevent
security issues. This means that when the user uploads a zip file, it will
display the details of the plugin or theme that they're using and ask for
confirmation.
3. An accompanying firefox extension will be provided which will allow
people to upload zip files by right clicking on the hyperlink and selecting
one of several wordpress based weblogs to upload it to.
4. It will integrate with the theme and plugin menus. Thus, it will allow
users to not only deactivate plugins and themes from the respective menus,
but delete them from the web server altogether.
5. The methods of interacting with the actual webserver is either through
writing it directly (using php's file copy function) but this creates
difficulties with unix style file permissions, using cURL's ftp to write to
the own webserver, or other conventional methods.

Essentially the goal of this is to bring in good methods of traditional ftp
based installs which cause several difficulties.

I would love feedback on this, and I'm writing it as a direct extension to
wordpress, based on the nightly build as certain changes cannot be brought
on purely using the plugin API.

Thanks
Anirudh


-- 
Anirudh Sanjeev
Third Year Undergraduate Student, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
http://anirudhsanjeev.org
Mail: anirudh at anirudhsanjeev.org
Phone: +91-97335-04828
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