Im about 3/4 way through the coding of another little plugin; something I probably want more than anyone else, but i thought I might might toss the idea out and see what others thought was best for it.
A little background first, every string, every file, every piece of data, has whats called an MD5 checksum. That checksum is typically used to verify file integrity. For instance, the wp zip hosted for download on this site has a checksum that will not change until the file itself is changed. If your download of that zip became corrupted, for instance, the checksum of the file you would have would be different than the one on the server.
Consider a checksum to be a unique verifiable signature or fingerprint.
Arguably, it's something that (non) Windows users typically pay more attention too. redhat.com, for instance, provides sha (secure hash algorithm) checksums for all of its Redhat Linux downloadables.
So anyway, I am about 3/4 way through completion of a plugin that will that compute the unique MD5 checksum of any file (in a given directory) with one click. It will also compute the MD5 checksum of file, as it is uploaded. (The generator part works, I just need to "pluginize")
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Questions to whoever might be interested in this:
1. Given the many different file manager plugins, would you rather just have something that allows the one click computing, minus the uploading feature. Say, maybe just a simple tab under the 'manage" menu?
2. Or is the uploading also part important to you?
3. And other wants, needs, ideas?
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Like I said, I realize this is a niche plugin, few "normal" people use checksums these days, so if I get no replys or suggestions, I'll merely write it the best way for me.
For more info on MD5 in general: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5
For more info on MD5 checksums: http://www.cert.org/security-improvement/implementations/i002.01.html
For a simple-to-use Windows based MD5 checksum calculator:
http://www.whitsoftdev.com/md5/
