henningsprang

and here some links to the docs(also adding them to the wiki right now):

* http://dd32.id.au/projects/wordpressorg-plugin-information-api-docs/
* http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress.org_API
* http://ckon.wordpress.com/2010/07/20/undocumented-wordpress-org-plugin-api/

Sorry for not posting the solution.

I found some documentation abpout using the wordpress api to get information about plugins, it is available in various formats, like:

http://api.wordpress.org/plugins/info/1.0/authenticator.json
http://api.wordpress.org/plugins/info/1.0/authenticator.php
http://api.wordpress.org/plugins/info/1.0/authenticator.xml

There you find the latest version available for plugins hosted in the official repositories (and we’re trying to use only these).

Another crucial part is to find the version of a plugin you have in place, which is harder because there is no standard place in a plugin directory where it must be written.

WordPress istself contains code with a complex logic to find the version of a plugin, which I turned out to be using.
If you need further information, please ask, I can dig it out for you, and/or try to clean my code for creating and updating the self-built RPM packages from company specific parts and publish it.

And by the way, thanks guys – once i got the right question it didn’t take long to get the answer. This api stuff is really cool to write custom packaging and update code 🙂

O.K.

So I’m assuming this functionality will keep being there and isn’t deprecated – and I’m not going to have to rewrite my packaging scripts, great 🙂

If there’s anything I can do to help, don’t hesitate to let my know!

BTW: I’d be happy to provide a patch warning users that empty mails cannot be sent, but I’m not sure where and how it’s best implemented.

As I needed a solution that is scriptable and does not require using the web GUI or anything like “got through tables manually” because I want to be able to import live data continuously, easily fast, I wrote a shell script that works well for me.

Turned out to be much simpler than it looked in the end. Obviously, even though the hostname is contained in many serialized arrays, there seems to be no need to replace all these occurences.
If that need would arise, I’d go to rewrite this script in php and do an unserialize – replace hostname – serialize – save action for each of them.

DB_BASE_COMMAND="mysql -h $DB_HOST -u $DB_USER $DB_PASSARG $DB_NAME -e"

# set password to testtesttest to prevent confusion with the live system login!
$DB_BASE_COMMAND 'UPDATE wp_mu_users set user_pass="$P$BShSdURpZajVRVrWIX5i/PX/MB24H1.";'

$DB_BASE_COMMAND "UPDATE wp_mu_site set domain = '$HOSTNAME' where id = 1;"
$DB_BASE_COMMAND "UPDATE wp_mu_blogs set domain = '$HOSTNAME';"

$DB_BASE_COMMAND "UPDATE wp_mu_options SET option_value = 'http://$HOSTNAME' WHERE option_name = 'home' OR option_name = 'siteurl' ;"

BLOG_IDS=<code>$DB_BASE_COMMAND 'select blog_id from wp_mu_blogs where blog_id!=1 \G;' | grep blog_id | cut -f 2 -d\</code>

for blog in $BLOG_IDS; do
        BLOG_PATH=<code>$DB_BASE_COMMAND "select path from wp_mu_blogs where blog_id=${blog}\G;" | grep path  | cut -f 2 -d \</code>
        #echo $BLOG_PATH
        $DB_BASE_COMMAND "UPDATE wp_mu_${blog}_options SET option_value = 'http://${HOSTNAME}${BLOG_PATH}' WHERE option_name = 'home' OR option_name = 'siteurl';"
done

# turn off domain mapping
$DB_BASE_COMMAND 'UPDATE wp_mu_domain_mapping set active = 0;'

Thanks for your reply, I guess we mean the same, I’m just looking from the other end and my description is heavily oversimplified, as I admit 😉

Unfortunately, these ways are not well suited for our environment – changing hosts files is not easy for people with Mac’s or Windows in our corporate environment, and also changing development names to match a specific length sounds ugly and won’t work with all names.
Another hack that might work is to use a proxy with a faked hosts file.

We gonna see what we will do, maybe digging deeper into the code to find out in detail how widget settings work. Even though there’s something coded at a deeper level, there must also be a way to change/trick this. At least I hope so…