i.justrealized

WordPress 2.7 introduced a feature to perform automatic updating of plugins and WordPress itself. It annoys me endlessly that the automatic update refuses to work and require me to input a FTP username and password which I don’t have. This blog runs on a server that does not have FTP installed. I use SSH for that. The method is to change ownership of your WordPress directory to www-data (for Apache).

Run the following command in your WordPress directory (sudo required):

That did the trick for me by changing the ownership every folder and it’s files recursively to ‘www-data’. It is slightly risky and you may not like the idea of giving so much privileges to the WordPress directory. But before I can think of any way to attack the server, I guess this method is more or less safe. Unless there is a malicious plugin that you install. Always install proven plugins. That said, use it at your own risk.

Changing the ownership give Apache access to your WordPress directory allowing WordPress to overwrite its own files and automatic update works. Well not really automatic actually. Semi-automatic since you actually have to trigger something to continue the update.

Thanks jer for the hint.

What? You can patent that?

Abstract

A computer Implemented method of automatically removing space characters from data being entered into a database system are provided. When a user creates a table in a database system into which data having leading and/or trailing character spaces may be entered, the user may specifically instruct the database system to remove any character spaces before entering the data into the table. Consequently, when a piece of data is being entered into the table, the database system will determine whether the piece of data includes leading and/or trailing character spaces. If so, the database system will automatically remove the character spaces from the piece of data before it is entered into the table. Hence, the use of TRIM functions when retrieving data from the database system will be obviated. (Source: USPTO)

Well it’s a fairly simple idea…