WordPress 2.2 has been released. And now it comes boxed up with WordPress Widgets.
I’m really glad this particular feature is included …. for one, it takes some surfing at the Automattic site to find the plugin, and a lot of users I encounter have a hard time figuring out how to upload a plugin.
One feature I’d love to see incorporated into future versions: Some kind of FTP tool embedded within WP admin panel so users can easily upload plugins and new themes.
Yes, I am not a programmer guru … but hey, I can dream, right?
This “could” be done but I think it will cause as many issues as it fixes. The biggest problem you will run into is file ownership (assuming you are running on a *nix server). When you upload a file via FTP the file is owned by the user that was logged into FTP. If the file (a plugin for example) is uploaded via web it “typically” will end up being owned by the user that is running the web server. On most *nix boxes this is a user called “nobody” or some other id with very little server permissions. This mismatch in ownership can cause a lot of issues (you can’t delete the plugin via ftp, only via web etc.).
Joomla/Mambo has an upload system like you describe and we do run into a fair amount of ownership issues because of that.