I haven’t been feeling particularly inspired for the last few months. I don’t know why but with a busy workload, not a lot of “spare time” and watching things develop its left me a little uninspired.
Add to that a space which isn’t really all that exciting at the moment, and I’ve struggled for inspiration. With all this being said, I have been using the time to add and modify my own development stack, and this is what I’ve spent a few hours doing today.
API
Firstly, I have updated my repo installer in my utility plugin to return version numbers better and better identify the main plugin file for installs. This makes the data fed into WordPress more reliable, more uniform and safer from a slug, main file, folder and other information for the installer. It’s also faster as I have been able to remove every single exception from the exception list, so this should save me a lot of time when adding new plugins to the list.
This Plugin and Theme API all work with wp-update-server and serve the versions automatically; the original plugin and themes are not publicly accessible and are served only via a secure API endpoint. I have made some tweaks to wp-update-server-tweaks to get this to work seamlessly.
Installer Changes
Installer changes where needed to work with the API changes so at the same time, I improved caching for search. Previously, a search by typing would refresh the cache often; now it’s stable and reads the cached version unless a manual refresh is order in which case it refreshes and updates the cache.
This will make searching and adding a plugin easier, allowing me to add a new plugin and pull it when needed, easier and quicker and should reduce load on my repo server by a lot. better control and I decide when I reload the data, either manually or at the end of the 6-hour cache, although I am considering increasing this now to 24 hours, given I can manually pull information again.
