[wp-xmlrpc] GSOC - are there any improvements that could be made

[Eric Mann]

One thing that I find useful is directly related to plug-ins.  Some plug-ins
run checks before activation to make sure a particular WP installation can
support it (checking for the gd image library, checking PHP version
compatibility, checking to make sure WP is up-to-date, etc).  When those
checks fail, some plug-ins will refuse to activate.  It's better to display
a "please upgrade XX feature" than to break a site.  Unfortunately, many
uses take that kind of failure to mean the plug-in is broken and report it
as such, leaving a developer scratching his or her head trying to figure out
what broke.  Other times a plug-in might throw a fatal error during
operation (maybe the user installed an incompatible javascript library or
edited their theme to pass the wrong variables).  Once again, users report
the plug-in as broken and the developer is left with nothing.

I built a rudimentary system that uses XML-RPC in my plug-ins to report back
to my server.  It's only active in a few private plug-ins right now, but
here's the gist: When a plug-in is first activated, it uses XML-RPC to
report back to me what plug-in it is, where it was activated, the admin's
contact email (in case I need to contact them), and the highest version of
everything installed (WP, PHP, MySQL, etc).  If installation fails, it sends
me an error message that ties in to this registration ... that way I can
contact the blog owner and explain what went wrong and hopefully how to fix
it.

Ideally I'd be able to hook in to WP's built in error system to report other
runtime errors as well, but right now I just register activation, error on
activation, and deactivation through XML-RPC.

Having a full system would be a LIFESAVER for me as a developer.  There have
been a handful of times where I've released a plug-in for the current
version of WP only to have users who'd refused to upgrade install it and
flame me online for distributing a "broken" plug-in.  

-----Original Message-----
From: wp-xmlrpc-bounces at lists.automattic.com
[mailto:wp-xmlrpc-bounces at lists.automattic.com] On Behalf Of Joseph Scott
Sent: Wednesday, March 31, 2010 8:42 AM
To: wp-xmlrpc at lists.automattic.com
Subject: Re: [wp-xmlrpc] GSOC - are there any improvements that could be
made

On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 1:08 AM, Eitan Adler <eitanadlerlist at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Per http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_Support only three (+1 for
> wordpress) APIs are supported.
> Is there anything I could to improve the XML-RPC implementation? Are
> there any services that support XML-RPC that might be useful to have
> in wordpress either as a plugin or in core?


Looking through the web interface in wp-admin, there are numerous
things that WordPress doesn't yet expose via XML-RPC.  Someone already
mentioned plugin/theme management.  Basically any piece of wp-admin
that isn't already exposed is a potential target for improvement.


-- 
Joseph Scott
joseph at josephscott.org
http://josephscott.org/
_______________________________________________
wp-xmlrpc mailing list
wp-xmlrpc at lists.automattic.com
http://lists.automattic.com/mailman/listinfo/wp-xmlrpc