Hey Guys,

Coming to the end of my project for GsOC, the repository manager and client, I came up with an interesting idea.
I noticed that there seems to be quite a few core geeklog updates for various security fixes, etc, and each time the web master has to download, and overwrite existing file(s).
While this is not too much work, it is some, and after writing a library for plugin update installation, I came up with the idea that I can easily write a library and manager for automatic security updates for Geeklog core components. While this will be outside of the gsoc project, I would like to get your input on it.

The basic idea is that:

On the main geeklog.net site, where security updates are posted, the administrator would upload the patch file following the autocorepatch install instructions, that will then dictate which files to be patched, databases patched, etc.

Every time a admin logs into the admin panel, while the plugin check for updates is performed, as well a check for any new security releases or other releases from Geeklog.
If there are any, it installs them for the user.
An extension of this is if there is an upgrade, then the user is notified, and they can upgrade with a click of a button, instead of all the downloading, etc.

What are your ideas on this?

- Tim

Always ask first. Automatic updates can cause problems.

I don't think geeklog.net's host provider would appreciate every install of Geeklog hitting geeklog.net every time an admin page is loaded. Better would be to use the existing "version check" admin link so the admins could check for updates when they wanted to. I suppose you could put something in the gl_vars table to hold when the last check was made and what version was found. Then the admin could control the interval for update checking and the result would be stored so a staticpage could be used to put a notice on the page of people you want informed of updates. (It's not always the admin.) The interval setting should also have a value meaning Never Check.

The patch code would need to be able to check that the files that need updating have not been modified before attempting to patch them. A lot of Geeklog installs have customizations that require applying personalized patches to the core code base and not all of these customizations fit neatly into lib-custom.php.